Typography - Week 2

Typography is the art of arranging letters and text in a way that makes the copy legible, clear, and visually appealing to the reader. Typography involves font style, appearance, and structure, which aims to elicit certain emotions and convey specific messages.

Terminology

• Kerning: The space between letters in a word

• Serif and San serif fonts: Serif fonts have 'wings' which help with readability, your eye travels to the next letter more easily.

• LMS: Learning management system

• CMS: Content management system

• Leading: space between lines

• Skewing: Angle of the text

• Cognitively: How your brain understands something,

• DPI: dots per inch

• PPI: pixels per inch

• Emotive: how things make you feel.

• Hierarchy: order of importance

• Affordance: how much impact something has

Task 1

Create the following words: Obsessed, Yuck, Cosy, Freezing using only ONE typeface for each one. You must use A4 document size; but you can decide if it is landscape or portrait. Consider how you place the word on the page, the size of the font and spacing (kerning) of the letters.

Task 2

Create a design for the manifesto that you have developed. You should first research some other typography ideas and examples of manifesto creations.

Draft

In this draft I have intended to experiment with space, and most importantly typography. I knew I wanted my text to be bold and s p a c i o u s. I really liked the idea of highlighting words that I felt are important with size, in a way this was meant to make them stand out and become eye catching to the potential reader of my manifesto, as if the bold words are a guide to a bigger message. After completing my draft I realised that my approach to the use of space on the page was not perfect. My biggest issue with my draft comes from the overwhelming amount of wasted space which exists around larger words. Because of that I struggled to fit the whole manifesto on my page which forced me to leave the third paragraph unedited.

Final Version

As I moved to creating my final version I knew I need to address my previous problem of space management. Despite liking my previous approach, this time I decided to cram all my text together as much as I could. In my mind this would create a powerful and slightly overwhelming message, conveying themes of passion and desperation to get it out there. Similarly to my draft, I knew I needed to highlight important words again, this time, however, I decided to use colour to achieve that effect. I liked the idea of someone scrubbing all over the manifesto with a yellow highlighter pen that's why I made sure to create realistic paint strokes and pen scribbles. I used yellows throughout my manifesto as yellow to me is my dyslexia colour which helps me read, I thought that would be a nice touch. Additionally, I used grey as a complementary colour to yellow as I believe they create a nice contrast against each other.