jsc717

 

For our last blog post, we were told to find a wayfinding signage anywhere in Abu Dhabi with a ‘type crime’, explain, and suggest an alternative that will better serve the purpose. I wanted to explore this further outside of our campus, but project deadlines and final presentations all due in the same week restrained me from doing so. I walked around campus hoping to find a signage that I could write about, but they all seemed to do the job one way or the other; I would say that none of the escape and rescue plan seemed appealing and eye-catching however, due to the choice of colors and the layout of different elements, but the typography seemed to do the job. In the escape and rescue plan, sans-serif font was used which I believe was a good decision since the added elements in the strokes of the letters (serif) would have hindered the attention from the readers. Escape and Rescue Plan should really just be about displaying and naming the locations, and not about adding tones and mood through different typefaces. I also thought the labels of each locations in the building were way too small. The whole point of these safety/ escape plan signages is to help people at times of emergency, and making the font size too small to the point one can barely read the labels from a step away is extremely ineffective. While I had this analysis in my head, I thought about searching for signages that we often do not give much attention to but are crucial in wayfinding during emergency.

 

This assignment in particular gave me an opportunity to study all the signages around me with great detail and I decided to talk about the one I found by the stairs.

 

 

Sans-serif typeface- Gotham, was used, but I wanted to point out the alignment, kerning and the relative sizes that were problematic. First of all, the sizes. Sizes of fonts determine the hierarchy of information. In signages like this, I think it’s very important to bring the most important bit of the information forward and leave the less important parts behind. On the signage, Arabic and English are displayed with the same size, which isn’t wrong, but as you squint your eyes, you see a block of white blurb below the ‘03’. In case of emergencies like fire, it is crucial for people to distinguish the different languages on the signage in an instant so that they don’t spend their precious time trying to read Arabic instead of English from steps away in the smoke. To overcome this problem, adding a few lines of spacings in between the Arabic and English would have served its purpose better. However, I totally opt for the large, bold ‘03’ on the signage to help people notice it faster; after all, it’s the most important part of the information on the signage. In the beginning, I did feel that the ‘Top of Stair- Level 07 (Roof)’ and ‘Bottom of Stair- Level 02’ were unnecessary, but I feel that they are quite crucial as rescue teams can have a quick overview of the floor systems in the building (eg. No residents living on the top floor, and exit is on Level 02). Perhaps altering the weight of the texts could have done an effective job.

Secondly, the alignment. This isn’t the biggest problem with this signage, but I believe ‘A5B2’ could have been on a different line, perhaps right at the top of the signage. Having ‘A5B2’ right next to the STAIR is a bit bizarre to me (and it isn’t even aligned at the same line) but if it’s an absolute must, it would fit better right at the top. I would need some more explanations behind the design but if the stair itself is named STAIR A5B2, it would look better to have the words aligned in the middle, just like others.

The worst type-crime that this signage has committed is the kerning. Kerning indicates the relative spaces between the letters in typeface. On the signage, it’s pretty obvious to us that ‘STAIRA5B2’ is actually composed of two words- STAIR and A5B2. However, for people who are dyslexic, this can be a bit challenging since uneven spaces between letters can hinder their abilities to read. As mentioned before, although these signages don’t get the most attention on our campus, it is crucial to have the designs and layouts clear and simple so that people get the message they need without having to pay a lot of attention to the details.

If I were to redesign the signage, I would fix all of the problems mentioned. In terms of the typeface, I would still keep it to Gotham since it’s NYU’s typeface. Changing the typeface of an Escape and Rescue Plan would be reasonable, but I think the signage is still representative of the buildings that belong to NYU, so keeping the typeface to Gotham would be a better choice. If I absolutely had to choose a different typeface, I would go with Verdana since it’s a very legible sans-serif typeface and there is a greater contrast in the strokes in Verdana Bold than Gotham Bold. 

 

 

 

 

+ I didn’t have the Arabic version of Verdana so I left it out of the redesigned signage. Compared to the original signage, I would say the redesigned version is definitely more legible and therefore putting an Arabic dedicated signage of the same layout next to the English maybe a solution but again, I’m not as skilled and experienced in wayfinding signages so I’m not sure if it will be the best solution. Nevertheless, the idea still remains the same; adding more lines of spacing between Arabic and English so they are more easily distinguishable and adjusting the alignment, position and relative sizes to highlight the hierarchy of information. 

 

Now that the end of the semester is coming up to an end, I think I’ve worked with Glyphs long enough to write a post about it. Before I took this class, I didn’t know much about what I was going to learn. Throughout the course, there were fun exercises that we did together like Adenos and creating posters using Adobe Illustrator. Now that we are almost done in terms of the content of this course, I can finally see how all the small activities that I thought were just there for fun add up to creating our own typeface using Glyphs. Personally, the whole process of designing a typeface was extremely engaging and exciting especially because it was my first time creating one, and the thought of creating my own personal typeface seemed really cool. 

Although we’ve had several sessions in class to watch short tutorials and make cheat sheets out of it, the best way I learned was when we were left to use Glyphs alone. Not that any of the exercises like making notes and posters weren’t helpful, I just thought that whatever we needed or wanted the glyphs to do, there was a new skill to learn. And I feel that ‘doing’ it rather than ‘watching’ it from video tutorials is much more effective in terms of how much I can remember to use it the next time I needed it. Now that I’m 75% expert in Glyphs, I can laugh at myself in the past for adding so many unnecessary nodes in a letter and tweaking it here and there countless times to create soft curves and lines. Working with Glyphs also helped me with Bezier curves; this really helped me with another course- Yes, Logo- when using Adobe Illustrator to create complicated logos. 

I think using Glyphs has been the best learning experience so far, because as I create a letter, I notice so many common features it shares with other letters. For example, I was working with Glyphs today to create a set of capital letters. My inspiration and reference typeface is Palatino and the set of capitals in Palatino were very different to the lowercase letters. I felt lost because I didn’t know where to start. However, as soon as I started noticing similar patterns in letters like ‘I’, ‘L’ and ‘E’, it was so much easier than I had anticipated. 

To be honest, I am extremely happy with the result of my typeface (although there are still some letters I need to work on) and I am grateful that I can walk out of the classroom with a new skill learned- creating typeface by hand and a software. I wish I could have worked more to fine-tune my typeface, which I am certain I will be doing even after the course finishes this semester. If I ever had the chance to recreate another typeface, I would try to experiment with other typefaces like Lucida and Faroe, but most definitely, I want to create a sans serif typeface. 

Overall, I am so pleased that our class can fill the whole table in the design studio with our work, drawings, test-outs, tracing papers, posters and drafts to prove our engagement towards this course. I’m also really excited to listen Quim, John and Zsombor’s presentations about their own typefaces and how they incorporated common features in their set of letters. 

As I mentioned in the previous blog post, I am taking an Interactive Media course called the Temporary Experts that overlaps a lot with Types of Art and Yes, Logo in terms of its contents. In the last few lectures in the IM course, I was working on producing an advertisement or campaigns to promote and raise awareness in the overuse of plastics. As I was creating these posters, I was fascinated by how typography plays a role in evoking emotions from the audiences. Taking these courses together at once has really given me the opportunity to appreciate the significant roles that typography plays in bringing out the public’s attention. I can now relate to the very first reading assignment we had; the metaphorical analogy of typography being portrayed as a balloon that gives the text its shape-meaning. The texts carry different emotions and tones according to the typeface it is used to display them and I think it’s fascinating that we can all relate to it.

Typography is such an important element in graphic design and knowing how to bring out emotions through typography is such a useful skill to have as a graphic designer. So I decided to explore the common typographies that are used in websites and the characteristics they carry.

Personal and Human

In order to bring out the emotions of ‘spontaneity, friendliness and authenticity’, script or handwritten typefaces are used. The first two are very good examples of nailing this correctly, but if you look at the third image, the script typeface is used all over the website that it reduces the legibility and readability. In order to create an impact, it is important for all graphic designers to be aware of the optimum size and context the typeface is used in, in order to achieve this.

Fun and informal

The wide typeface used in the first image shows happiness, humor, joy and exuberance. Similarly to the last example, this website was only successful in achieving this because the designer was aware of the context. A more consistent way of achieving this is shown in the second image. Irregular sans serif font is used so that the tone that is applied on the typeface doesn’t appear too formal yet too informal. Personally I think it’s more readable while having a friendly and easily approachable tone to it. 

Formal

The mood to aim for when designing websites that should appear to users as more formal is seriousness, professionalism and credibility. In this case, using wide, irregular and bubbly typeface will be inappropriate. Most of the time, no more than 2 typefaces (usually the classic serifs and sans serifs) are used on the website to establish the consistency and the tone of formality. In this case, colors used on the website is also minimized to maximize the effects of hierarchy; texts that need to be emphasized.

The examples above specifically looks at the most common typeface personalities used on websites, but this is apparent everywhere, from logos to billboards and posters. Different typefaces used in different environments elicit different emotional responses from people; they allow users to personally connect to the brands. 

There was an interesting experiment carried out by Rosalind Picard and Kevin Larson on the effects of typography on cognitive performance and how typeface affects reader moods. 20 participants were divided in groups of 10, and were left to read one of the issues of the New Yorker on a tablet device set in different typefaces for 20 minutes. Some were given the issues set with a proper typeface version, and some with badly typeset versions. The groups were randomly interrupted and were asked to conjecture how much time had passed since they started reading. This may be obvious but people had a positive mood experience underestimated the time. How obvious this may be, the experiment clearly showed the positive effect of good typography on the moods of the readers. 

I am becoming more fascinated and appreciative of typography and typefaces as the days go by and I am glad that I’m beginning to look at signs and logotypes in a more ‘graphic designer’ way.

---

How Typography Plays With Consumer Moods: A Dance of Letters!

http://joogpot.eu/knowledge/16-webdesign/57-evoke-emotion-through-typography

I had to write a blog entry for another class that Professor Goffredo teaches, which is called Yes, Logo. To sum it up, I basically wrote about the design processes in creating a unique logo that gives a brand its identity and meaning. Since I have to write another blog entry for Types of Art, I decided to explore more about the design processes in designing a typeface and how they differ from designing a logo.

1. Design a brief

When designing a logo, designers usually get the design brief from the clients where the clients specify exactly what they want and expect. However, when designing a typeface, designers have to come up with their own design brief. They need to ask questions like where and how it will be used as these questions will allow the designed typeface to have a purpose. 

2. Make fundamental choices

Before designing a typeface, designers need to make some fundamental choices. They need to decide whether their designs will be a serif or sans serif font, if they will be of writing implements or geometrical shapes, and if they will be designed for academic writing or posters. For beginner type designers, it’s better to work with serif fonts because ‘the features that provide these typefaces [sans serif]  with their identity are much more subtle’.

3. Use your hands

Some people who are more keen on using computer softwares to initiate their designs as typographers might not like this but it is so much better and more time effective to sketch curves and shapes on paper. What’s surprising is that we tend to draw smoother lines and curves on paper than on software!

4. Start with ‘Control Characters’

Lowercase control characters are ‘n’ and ‘o’ and Uppercase control characters are ‘H’ and ‘O’. Designing these letters first will help the designers to set an overview of the typeface’s style, and bring other letters into harmony. In our studio hours, we worked on ‘adenos’ but ‘adhesion’ is also a good word to tackle except ‘c’ will replace the letter ‘s’ due to its complexity in designing. 

5. Move to your computer

There are different ways to go about it and there’s certainly no right or wrong answers but most type designers sketch a letter that they are satisfied with, trace it manually using a fine tip pen and scan it through a scanner to transfer the manual drawing onto the computer.

6. Choose your software and draw some letters

There are many type designing software like Glyphs and Robofont. Digitalize the scanned and traced letter by using Bezier curves. In order to work more accurately and precisely, place the points on the extremities of the curves on the letter form. 

7. Move into text view mode and test out some words

Using glyphs, try typing in some words and edit the shapes of each of the letterform to make them look great in harmony, and not just separate individual letters.

8. Scale it down, explore different styles and widths

The style of the typeface may look different when viewed on a large scale and on a smaller scale. This is when type designers experiment the most as they try out different styles and widths of the letterform to achieve the look they are looking for. Just like how letterforms look different when magnified and when they are looked from far away, try printing on a page to see how it really looks on a hard copy! You may notice some areas of your design that needs more refining that you weren’t able to catch on screen.

9. Add special characters and put it to usage!

This is the last step! Add the special character that will make your typeface complete and put it to usage.

 

The design processes when designing a typeface and logos are distinctively different. I think type designers have more freedom in exploring than logo designers the fact that they can come up with their own brief (but I guess it will be a different story when type designers get commissioned). Since we are in the process of coming up with designs and exploring different styles on paper, I thought it would be a great opportunity to know what is ahead in terms of designing and digitalizing our typefaces in the future. 

 

https://www.creativebloq.com/typography/design-your-own-typeface-8133919

If you were to write a short cover letter for your summer internship on campus, what font would you choose?

 

Arial?

Times New Roman?

Helvetica?

Comic Sans?

Papyrus (below is the Papyrus typeface)?:

  

 

Of course, if you weren’t in our Types of Art class, you wouldn’t really know the difference except for Times New Roman which you will most likely be choosing because it’s familiar to you. While taking this course however, I started to notice the key features of typefaces and wondered about why some of the typeface designs were more popular than others.

For example, Helvetica is one of the most popular typefaces while Comic Sans is the opposite in terms of its reputation. As a used-to-be-a-fan of Comic Sans back in my days when I used it for almost any document from my birthday invitation cards to my short essay submission, I decided to research what features of these typefaces appeal or appall to the audience.

 

Helvetica

 

 

Helvetica was released in 1957 and a lot say that marketing is what made Helvetica the Helvetica it is now; it was designed right at the right time. Helvetica took inspirations from old typeface designs but was new and refreshing. A lot of other typefaces took a similar approach by creating a modern look from the existing typefaces in the past, but they did not stand a chance in terms of marketing. Helvetica was very heavily marketed; its name was changed from ‘Neue Haas Grotesk’ to the much memorable name ‘Helvetica’.

In terms of its design, its simplicity is what made it impactful. As the nature of advertising in the 60s took its turn and people became tired of traditional and classical illustrations and script typefaces, Helvetica’s clear and modern yet having not much deviation from the old script made it look more neutral and bolder to replace it. Not only has the typeface made its way successful in marketing, but it was also released at the right time when there were cultural shifts and development in forms of advertisements.

Nowadays, we see Helvetica almost everywhere as it is the core typeface used by Apple. It became the symbol of typographic excellence to the point many graphic designers find Helvetica to be at the top of the typeface hierarchy. This is well supported by the phrase ‘When in doubt, use Helvetica’.

In other words, the popularity of Helvetica arose from its coincidental release during the cultural shift and its marketing strategy and not really from its design specifically.

 

Comic Sans

 

 

It hurts a little that I am writing about one of my favorite fonts. It reminds me so much of my childhood especially because I used that font in both my Korean IT class back in primary school and in my middle school IT class in Malaysia. Comic Sans to me is like a flipbook of my childhood. It looks like a neat handwriting, inoffensive and warm.

Back when Comic Sans was first designed by Vincent Connare to be incorporated in the speech bubbles of an animated cartoon dog for Microsoft Windows, he did not realize the amount of attention it would bring. He even stated himself that Comic Sans was developed for younger users and not for everyone. Unexpectedly, the typeface began to be used everywhere from formal documents, on signs, in advertisements and billboards until two typographers started a ‘Ban Comic Sans’ movement in 2002.

 

 

 

Moreover, unlike Helvetica which its design wasn’t the main reason for its popularity, Comic sans actually lack in the design features compared to many other typefaces. For example, its angular consistency and kerning is all different resulting in no cohesive flows. The typeface is now used in ‘memes’ and because it is often associated with such culture of making fun of the use of Comic Sans, not many people want to associate with it.

 

+Papyrus

 

 

Papyrus was designed by an illustrator Chris Costello who was paid 750 pounds in 1983 for the design. In one of his interviews, he said that he was inspired by the Middle East and biblical times. He sold the font to a British company that works with vinyl lettering shapes until the company began licensing its fonts for use in desktop applications.

Similarly to Comic Sans, Papyrus is hated due to its misuse and overuse. This took away the originality and the effectiveness of the design. One example of its popular use was in James Cameron’s Avatar and on May 23^rd2017, Julio Torres from SNL tweeted:

This post received more than 2100 retweets and 8700 likes in less than six months.

 

I learned that a lot of typefaces that appall to the audience are the ones that are misused and overused. They don’t follow the traditional rules and disciplines in designing typefaces which bother a lot of type designers and people.

I think it was interesting to learn through my research that designing typefaces is indeed a tough process which requires subtlety, practice, observation and discipline. I have learned to appreciate the typefaces and I cannot stop but to wonder why someone chose to use certain typeface for their posters on our campus elevators and on TV shows. Typeface plays such an important role in the tone it sets and the message it carries, like a balloon giving shape to helium; I am excited to experiment what kerning, proportion, angle and scale play in the first impression of a typeface in the upcoming workshops.

 

 

 

Before taking Types of Art, the phrase ‘Times New Roman’ didn’t resonate with me in any way. It was just a typeface that I was taught to use for my lab reports, essays and entries. I didn’t ask myself or many of the professors who told me to use it, why, and taking this course opened my perspective of approaching typography in many different ways; every time I’m on the lift on campus, I see posters designed by students, and interestingly enough, I have started to question why they had chosen such fonts and sizes with certain layouts, or analyzing if the typography on the poster is used as effectively as it could have been. Also, I started to pay more attention to the word ‘typography’ that when I found this interesting news article that was released in Korea about font copyrights, I thought I would share it.

 

Basically, a freelancer designer received an email demanding around $1000 worth of agreement money because s/he used 9 of the Korean letters in his/her work without paying for the license. According to the news, the designer thought the font design was released for free and therefore pleaded for a favorable handling of the issue by suggesting to pay for only the 9 letters, but was later rejected.

 

The article then went on about how it is important for people to be mindful when using downloaded fonts outside of copyright protected fonts, and that we should be careful about where and how it is going to be used. After reading this article, I wanted to learn more about it on a broader scale- law on typefaces in design and marketing.

 

Throughout the course, we have learned that typeface is a crucial key to transferring the message of the text to the readers, like a balloon that gives helium its shape (balloon the visual representation of a typeface and helium is the content of the text and the message it carries). As a student who is also taking Yes, Logo course which is a logo designing class that incorporates creating and redesigning logos for real, existing companies, I was surprised to learn that designers are not free to use any typefaces or fonts on logos or any of their designing products.

 

In order to do so, they would need a license to that specific font. The license comes with a description of how it should be used, either commercially or not, or restrictions on how many times a font can be installed in different computers. However, I was really interested to learn that in the United States, copyright law does not protect all typefaces! In fact, the law only protects scalable fonts and not the bitmapped fonts; scalable fonts are within a program or a software so the artistic design of the typeface in bit-mapped fonts is not protected. However, this is very specific to the US. Countries like Germany and England had allowed typeface designs to be protected by copyright since the 1980s.

 

 

Since the copyright law for using typeface is dissimilar in different countries, it would be helpful to ask a few questions to ourselves when we are faced with a situation of having to use fonts on marketing material and commercial designs.

 

1. Can I legally use the font?
2. Can I use the font for my intended purpose?
3. Can I sell or send a copy of the font to my client?

 

The answers to the first two questions are found on the license but to give more information about the third question, we are not allowed to do so for most commercial fonts; the client will have to separately purchase the font, or if not, they can vectorize the outline of the font and send it through. You may wonder if this is even legally possible, but from research, ‘an outlined font is not a font anymore’. I am a bit skeptical about this and can’t get away from the thought- ‘then why wouldn’t everyone just vectorize typefaces and fonts instead of paying for it?’ but I’m sure I’m missing some points and will do further research on this.

 

So far, Types of Art classes have left me with a lot of questions about typography in general, and I am very excited to unravel these questions in the upcoming lectures and workshops. Copyright laws on typefaces was one of many, and I am glad to have learned this aspect of typography and I hope this rather personal article helped you to do so too!