johnfirstdesign

Chapter 9: There is no bad type

2005-10-20T10:06:00.000-04:00

Two hundred years ago, copperplate engraving changed thelook of typefaces, as did all subsequent technologies: the pantograph, Monotype and Linotype machines, phototypesetting, digital bitmaps and outline fonts.
This is an example of a Monotype machine

The creation of the neon sign brought letter styles to a new level. It influenced graphic design, and people have spent a lot of time airbrushing a glow of light around curved, tubular letters. Like other graphic manipulations, achieving neon effects has become much easier with drawing and painting programs available on the computer, especially in Photoshop, (Effects-Glow/Neon).

With technology changing, Email notwithstanding, the letter is still the most common style of formal business communication. Letterheads make the first impression, and so are frequently printed on fine, heavy paper in several colors, sometimes with blind embossing or mock steel engraving. Today outline fonts can emulate any shape imaginable, if not necessarily desirable; they can equal and even improve upoon every aesthetic and technical refinement ever dreamed of or achieved. Apart from the typefaces that work well because we are familar with them, there are those that defy the simplistic classifications of usefulness or purpose. They may exist only because the type designer's first thought one morning was a new letter shape. These private artistic expressions may not appeal to a wide audience, but every now and again the right singer effortlessly transforms a simple song into a great hit. There are typographic gems hidden in today's specimen books just waiting to be discovered. In the right hands, technical constraints turn into celebrations of simplicity, and awkward alphabets are typographic hereos for a day.
There is no bad type.

Chapter 8: Putting it to work

2005-10-20T09:53:00.000-04:00

Books and furniture, quite the same thing, they all have served the same purpose for years. Types of books are used the same way: you can read, browse, look at pictures, or even check on something of particular interest. Pages offer various levels of entry for readers, viewers, and occasional browsers. These books will have to look different than our time honored tomes of linear reading, just as living rooms look different than bedrooms. Magazine pages are designed for the casual reader; there are snippets of information or gossip, headlines, captions, and other graphical signposts pointing toward various tidbits of copy. As advertisments change their look according to the latest trends, editorial pages tend to either look trendier, or to deliberately stay sober, bookish, and authoritative. Graphic designers and typographers call the containers columns or picture boxes, it is like a kitchen. The food is the text, the surface the page, and the tools are the typographic parameters needed to prepare an interesting page for the reader who has to digest it all.
There is no reason for hardworking pieces like price lists, technical catalogs, timetables, and similar heavy-duty information to look as ugly or complicated as they often do. If something looks dull, repetitive, and off-putting, people will approach it with a negative attitude, this does not improve their willingness to absorb the information.
So next time your are in your kitchen, don't sit on the surface, be careful how you use the tools and always digest your food, you don't want the feeling that someone might vomit your food you gave them.

Chapter 7: How it works

2005-10-20T09:37:00.000-04:00

Letters were originally invented to help communicate not high culture, but mundane things like the amount of goods delivered or their value in barter or currency. Phoenicins called it aleph and the Greeks called it alpha.

With such a mixed history, no wonder our alphabet looks so unbalanced. Anyone inventing a new alphabet today would doubtless be more practical and make letters more regular. Letters are like trees, hardly ever appear by themselves, except A and I. When a bunch of letters are put together, they fight for position to be recognized. If your text is going to be fairly long and that it will require some time to read, you should adjust the layout accordingly. Lines should be long enough to get complete thoughts into them and there ought to be enough space between them to allow readers to finish reading a line before their eye gets distracted by the next. If you want you type to be read you have to make an impression in your ad, you can't wait for the reader to get settled and look for your type, you have to make it flashy. Typographic details and refinement relate to everything else; if you increase your word spacing, you have to have more space between the lines as well. This is fixed by adjusting the kerning and spacing. When designing, we could make all of our designs and type different sizes, move them up and down, overlap them, put them into the background, or turn them sideways.
Design is endless and it all lies on the desinger and his or her imagination.

Chapter 6: Types of Type

2005-10-20T09:21:00.000-04:00

The more features we can see, the easier it is to tell who is who or what is what. That is the key statement for this blog. Our eyes scan the top of the letters' x-heights during the normal reading process, so that is where the primary identification of each letter takes place. Some weights of typefaces might be used more extensively than others, there is no paternal ore maternal dominance. No matter what it is, some things all look the same but are totally different items and act in a different way. For example, going with the one from the book, guitars.

These are all the same in the sense that they play music, they made sound different and look different but serve the same purpose. High designers call the different items needed to form a good design accessoires, they have to fulfill a particular function while achieving an aesthetic balance with the main design. Rhythm and contrast keep coming up when discussing good music and good typographic design. Every now and then an audience needs to be shaken up, either in music or in design. Just adding a more catchy or crazy typeface could bring up controversy in a design. Letters have been around in very much the same shape for several hundred years, and the language haven't changed beyond recognition either.
So basically type is just light music, you could have bold type or loud music, soft non bold type or soft rock favorites, you could have italisized or classical music or jagged type or heavy rock. That is why artist, like myself gets inspired by the music that I am listening to during the piece that I am working on and it shows.

Chapter 5: Type builds character

2005-10-12T18:01:00.000-04:00

It is right for everyone in america, we read top to bottom, left to right. Some books are better designed than others. Some cheap paperbacks do not usually represent the state of the typographic art. They could be nicer than they are because it costs no more to observe the basic rule of book layout using a good, legible typefac than to ignore these rules and set the text in whatever the printer happens to have around. Also, the way advertisments are displayed are a lengthy tradition of its style is established as that of the traditional book. Headline on top, attention-grabbing picture underneath, subhead, main copy, logo, pay-offline, address, URL, or telephone number. A designer could take a classic, well-tried typeface, arrange it in a predictable layout, and people may actually read your message.
Depending on the country we live in things might look different. In Europe, this page would look quite different, but with definite similarities within certain countries. You can always teall a German report from a Dutch, British, or Italian one, but they all have one thing in common: the picture.

Forms always have too much copy, so first choose a font thatis narrower than your run-of-the-mill ones. Make sure it is clearly legible, has a good bold weight for emphasis, and has readable numerals. Magazines are perhaps one of the best indicators of a country's current typographical tast; most of them get redesigned often enough to be on top of contemporary cultural inclinations. Magazine publishing is a very competitive business, and design plays a significant role in the way magazines present themselves to the general public.Magazines can look old-fashioned, conservative, trendy, technical and noisy.
One good thing in design is that you can recycle ideas without being accused of petty larceny; people might even admire your interest in things historical. A good thing about today, is that we can look at old ads and recreate them almsot faithfully.

Chapter 4: Type with a purpose

2005-10-12T17:45:00.000-04:00

Design is a very tricky job to do. What do you do for a client, will they like your idea or will your typeface work well with what you are designing? You need to look at what the design calls for. Is it a fun idea, serious, sympathetic or even business oriented. You need to look at your client and their clients, even though you might not like it, you are the designers and they are the clients. Designers also have to look at the way fonts are designed, Sans serif versus serif. One or the other could totally ruin your design. In the early typefaces from the Renaissance and their modern equivalents fit descriptions of today. They still show their kinship with Italian handwriting, which by necessity had to be more casual than rigid metal letters. Most designers work and design for the eyes, whatever feels quite comfortabl. The more technical a profession, the cooler and more rigid its typefaces; the more traditional a trade, the more classical its typefaces.
Finally, the way that you see typefaces on the screen are not always the way they print out, especially the color. They are in RGB on the screen and composed of coarse lines or dots, and black is not an ink, but the absence of light, so you have to design your color choices around the design. Look at a wedding invitation. Some people have an outdoor wedding and some indoor. They want to design for the way that the wedding is. If it is layed back, it will be a more upbeat and fun typeface or if it is indoor it will be more elegant or scripted type style.

Chapter 3: Looking at type

2005-10-02T20:28:00.000-04:00

First off, type is always around us. We always have an eye for certain things that we read everyday. It could be from newspapers in the morning with our coffee, a magazine with our favorite sport's team in it or an e-mail from a business partner. These items could be horribly designed from laout to type to printing or images. Most people look at certain items and look at what color it is. We see a shoe and see it as yellow, or we see a word the helps us see that same shoe a different way and not just a color but a font that better explains that shoe. Sometimes it is not the way that the type is layed out, but what the font says and how it explains the product. Here is an example of the shoe question.

Mizuno Wave Nirvana
Cushion Running Shoe Mens

Type also has worked many ways with expressions of people. The characters of the letters in a physical characteristics, from light or heavy, round or square, slim or squat. Some emotions call for a black typeface with sharp edges, pleasant feelings are better evoked with light characters.There is many things that makes up a typeface or a letter. From the counter, kern, ascender, x-height, kern, serif, body and many more factors. Digital letters has been made to come from pixels. Every character has to be a certain number of pixels wide and high. Computer screeens are not where we real all of our type, phones, pdas, even microwave ovens. Some are small and simple but some are very complex.
So this goes with pretty much the way all of my discussions have ended, type is around us always and we see it no matter where we are.

Chapter 2: What is Type?

2005-09-15T14:31:00.000-04:00

What is type? That is the most common question to many people. It is like the question, what is Art? There are a broad number of answers to that question, but the question of type is kind of more narrow, a more precise look on way things are designed. Is it legible, can you get the information you are looking for from the poster, sign or text message, also is it legible.
Back in the early Roman times, most of the writing was legible to them, but in the present, it is very hard to depict what they were trying to say. With type today we have to consider the audience that a piece is designed for, what the letters have to look like based on the design and if it can be read by other people-NOT JUST THE DESIGNER! Now a days we have a delete button, white out, erasers and many other objects that can be used to delete letters that don't need to be on a design. In the Roman days there was not such thing. There was no room for error on a slab on concrete or rock or even a stone column. The Roman typeface was used throughout time called Fraktur(Broken Writing), that came from Italy and was used to set Romance languages like Italian, French, and of course Latin. Here is a page from Gutenberg's Book so you can see an example.
Cultural differences have been manifested in the way people write. Wherever you may travel you may find different logos or phrases that are the same all over the world but are written for that culture. Here is a famous comparison, Coca-Cola. The first one is American(had to a NASCAR reference in) and the same company in Glazorthian

Finally, the generations of life evolve and so does type. Screen fonts on cellphones and computers to the way type is perceived on television screeens, as noted in the book (Pixels are way cool). That is how type was evolved in the early times, nothing but pixels.
So everyday we are surrounded by typestyles and fonts no matter from your cellphone to your computer or your school schedule to your paycheck, DIFFERENT FONTS ARE ALL AROUND AND USED IN DIFFERENT WAYS!!!

Chapter 1: Type is everywhere

2005-09-08T10:24:00.000-04:00

If you think about it, how does type effect our lives? If type was taken away from us, we would not know where to go, what is in our food and many more casualities that could occur.

NEWSPAPERS
After reading the first chapeter in Spiekermann, there were many different viewpoints that they researched from newspapers to product labels and signage in todays society and in the past.
First beginning with the way newspapers and headings have changed. Most newspapers still keep with an Old English typeface that was used in the earlier days of newspapers. Also, they use a Times New Roman and bold face. This is an example of an old San Francisco newspaper, look at the heading and compare it to the modern the Herald and the others.

There are similar differences in the heading, but if you start reading into the newspapers, the layout is different, some use pictures and one is strictly a lot of words. If you ever get the chance go to the library and research all the different types of newspapers and how they are all layed out.

SIGNAGE
The next topic that I found very interesting is the end of the chapter that talks about signage and the way it is used and how it will attract the publics eyes. The government is well in control of how our signs look on our roads and highways. Although there are many different ways to see signs. Whether your reading it standing, driving or on a well-lit platform. No matter the situation light effects it. If it is at night and lit by electricity or in the day lit by the sun, bold face type styles and very easily to read are key to good signage. I experience this part of the book everyday in my job. I am a graphic designer for a sign company and here are some of the examples of the work I have done and how they compare to the topics talked about in the book.

Here is a link to our companies website if you would like to look at more ideas and projects that we have done.Brockman Signs

So next time you are traveling through your day to day travels, look around you and look at different signs, vehicle lettering and even your daily bathroom signs.

GOOD TYPE -vs- BAD TYPE

2005-08-24T07:38:00.000-04:00

Throughout all of advertising and time, there has been plenty of type styles that have put out that are good and bad. The first example is the Budweiser Beer logo. Throughout time, this logo has had many of face lifts. From a whole word to a single letter. The old style wanted to promote the "American" beer with the red, white and blue colors. The script or cursive font was very legible and recognizable everywhere.

With the new logo, the single letter is used throughout their companies brand recognition. It has the crown on top of the "B", looking like the top of a beer bottle. The colors also work very well together, the gold and the red.

Here is a link to there web site so you can see the variations of this new logoBudweiser

Next, is the example of the bad design. This example is a web site that I came upon. It is Atlas Design, which you would think would be layed out fairly good with being a web design firm but this page has dark images, broken links, bad choice of background and the first line of text is dark, it looks the same color as the background. This company could of put a box around the text, moved the text over a little bit or even chose a different color for the font. Even though big companies put up these extravagant logos or web sites, there is always error for mistakes.

Click on picture for enlargement and a better view of what I am talking about. Here is the link for Atlas Design and maybe you could find some more errors.Atlas Design