Wrap Up

Well Fall semester is over! It has been a really great class. 
I think by understanding type, I'm going to be able to use it as a tool to elevate the copy in my ads. Good typography can add another layer of meaning to the copy. Bad typography can make your copy so unappealing that nobody will read it. Now that I understand how to make type appealing to the eye, I think I have a great advantage. 

Project 3

For project three I created a campaign for meta font based on the poster I created. I made meta match books, ash trays, and other collateral. I also made ads to be placed on taxi tops, billboards, and in subways. I created a web banner to be placed on toxel.com. The campaign was designed to target advertisers and designers in New York City to encourage them to switch the design basic font from helvetica to meta. Overall, I think it was quite successful.

(Web Banner Video Below)

New Layer of Frustration

Of course it's a good thing that I now know more about typography. I also genuinely believe that understanding typography will help me create more effective ads but now that I have all this typography knowledge, it's constantly holding me up! I find myself working on the spacing and margins of my papers for half an hour. I'm also constantly trying to identify the font of signs or books or websites. Now that I know about typography, I can't stop thinking about it!

Handwriting vs. Type

     Every Sunday I read the Post Secret Blog. Frank Warren, who compiles and publishes the weekly blog, receives thousands of post cards that people anonymously  send to his house with their secrets written on them. What I find interesting is that some people don't take full advantage of the anonymous factor and chose to write their secret by hand. 

     I wonder why someone would need to use type to share a secret as trivial as the one below. If someone recognized your handwriting there wouldn't be any real fall out, it would just be funny. Plus they have chosen a font that looks very anonymous, common and standard. 

     The secret below is far more serious than the first one but the person has written it by hand. It looks like they did a little bit of disguising but it's definitely hand written.

     This is just shocking. The person who wrote this not only wrote it by hand but made no effort at all to disguise her hand writing. I wonder if she wants someone to recognize her hand writing? If someone does recognize it, there will be fall out for both the person who wrote it AND the person she's writing about... it's a bold choice she made! 

They say your handwriting says something about you, perhaps your choice about when to use your handwriting and when to use type says something about you too. I think in the case of the third post card, her choice to write in her own plain hand writing says something bad about her - she needs to learn from her boyfriend, and hold some things back too.  I never recommend helvetica, but if you submit a secret like this - helvetica is better than handwriting. 

Some Good Uses of Type in Logos

I quoted Adrien Frutiger in a previous blog entry. He essentially said that good type is type that you don't notice or remember. I think that can be a function of type but I don't think that being invisible is the quality that can make excellent type. I believe that type can be simple and memorable and can be elevated through innovation and creativity to draw the reader in. Here are some logos I found that are examples of type that make me stop and look and make me remember the information. That is the true power of typography - excellent typography can supplement the power of the information contained in the text. 

This is a logo for Killed Productions. The type looks like it's probably AG Book which was designed by Gunter Gerhard Lange in 1980. Lange also designed Akzidenz-Grotesk which was the precursor to Helvetica. This font is a very simple font and in a large block of text it would be fairly "invisible" like Frutiger likes but here it's the way the designer has used the type that makes it special. The way the 'i' has been flipped on its side like a dead person, elevates the type from simply invisible to supplemental to the text's meaning. The design of the type makes me want to stop and look which is far better than if it just looked totally normal.

The logo below appears to be set in Clarendon font, which is a slab serif. It's more complex than a sans serif but it's still fairly simple. The designer has used the same concept here by flipping a 2 to replace the 'n'. Again this simple but smart design choice makes the type contribute to the meaning of the text. 

The designer of the logo below for Goodduck has actually changed the letterform to add a layer of meaning to the advertisement. The designer has taken a serif 'g' and changed the ear of the g to look like a duck's bill and the descender on the loop to look like a duck's tail.

These are just some examples of how type can still be simple but contribute to the over all effectiveness of the ad instead of just being invisible. I think that if the type can ad an extra layer of meaning and depth to the ad it is far more powerful than type that you forget the second after it's read.

Take off your pants, now.

This has to be a joke right?
Are people so obsessed with this played out font that they would really pay $60 for a pair of Helvetica leggings? Even the model is trying to rip out her hair!
Why are people so obsessed with helvetica? It just doesn't make a bit of sense to me. Who would buy these? Maybe I would understand if a random typography obsessed person had these custom made, but how could these seriously be mass produced?
Probably mostly for people who want to be weird for the sake of being weird.
If you're one of those people or if you're one of the few people who genuinely loooooove helvetica that much, here's the link to throw away your money:

YOU HAVE BAD TASTE

What is the purpose of type?

"If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page... When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful."

Keynote Speech/Type90
Adrian Frutiger
Typographer, Designer of Univers Font (pictured below)

     Adrian Frutiger, the type designer who created Univers in the 1950's, said this in a speech. It's an odd way of looking at type but it seems fitting coming from the creator of Univers (pictured above), which is a particularly simple and unimposing typeface. I've heard of other typographers saying things like good typography makes reading the type effortless but I have to wonder if Frutiger takes it too far. I don't think that good typography is forgettable typography. In some cases it is; if you need a type that clearly conveys a message and is meant to do nothing more than get the information across, then sure, the typographic design doesn't have to be anything special. But, what if the typographic design was so unique and cool that it was what made you stop and read the information and it's the element that made you remember the information later? I think that's the best kind of typography. 
     I think that what Frutiger describes as "good typography" is like white paint on walls; white paint gets the work done, the walls are all one color, but it's not memorable and it's nothing special. What's special is the Sistine Chapel, that's how you paint a wall. Frutiger says that type is a tool, which it is, but he sells typography far too short. Maybe it's a reflection of the limit of his talents but I don't think his assessment is an accurate judgement of what typography should be or could be. Typography can be more than a tool, it can be an art it just takes the right designer to do it. Apparently, Frutiger is not that designer.