If the face fits (part 1: Type specimen book) Baskerville

11th Jun 2021Leave a comment

I started off my Serif typefaces with Baskerville. Baskerville was designed in the 1750s by John Baskerville in Birmingham, UK. Baskerville typeface showed contrast between thick and thin strokes and making serifs sharper and more tapered. Baskerville was inspired by Calligraphy and the typeface was and still is very popular in book design. John Baskerville wanted to create books of the greatest possible quality and his typeface certainly made this happen.

My idea for this design was to create a layout representing book design. My original idea was to create an old book and then incorporate Baskerville typeface and the characters into it.

I feel like I spent ages doing this design because I messed around with one idea trying to perfect it all day and then decided in the evening that the simplified version would be much better! I wanted to keep the old fashioned style but still try and bring in a modern vibe!

At home I have some old sketchbooks from 1905.. inside are all clothing patterns that have been drawn, there are blank pages that appear in the book though which are quite yellow and mottled with age and my initial idea was to scan these pages in to use as textures for my design. However, when I was scanning them in, the cover of one of the sketchbooks fell apart (they had been covered in brown paper) and underneath the brown paper was an old Edwardian/Victorian Cherub image with the words “Drawing book” I thought that would be a good idea to bring into my design but change the words “Drawing book” to “Baskerville”

**INSERT IMAGES OF DRAWING BOOK

I changed the colour of the Cherub image to try and make it look more modern.. I wasn’t convinced though. I also changed the name “Drawing book” to “Baskerville” in Photoshop. When I did my research on Baskerville, it is well known for its glamourous looking ampersand which I instantly recognised from the V&A logo. I decided to use that in the design as it adds that old traditional feel but with a modern twist.

“Bridging the gap between old style and modern type” was a quote I found that summarises Baskerville and that was the same feel that I wanted to carry through my design. I also used the quote to show off the different weights, variations and pt. sizes of Baskerville.

Digital Development

After doing much digital design development I realised (many hours later!) that the layout looked far better with just the ampersand. Let that ampersand do the talking!

The final mockup

The final design and layout is very simplistic and minimalist but I think it keeps an old fashioned traditional feel with a much more modern look.

If the face fits (part 1: Type specimen book) Chantal

10th May 2021Leave a comment

When it comes to decorative/ fun or “gimmicky” typefaces I am not very knowledgeable! In my work I mostly use Sans-Serif which is why I have made my specimen book “Sans heavy”! For this section of my specimen book I had to do my research and look into different typefaces that I could use for decorative fonts. I started by looking at Adobe fonts on Typekit. I found this one called Chantal which from first sight gave me lots of idea what I could do for the design for it in my specimen book!

Chantal was designed by Rian Hughes in England, other than the designer there is limited other information about the typeface so I designed the layout for the pages how I thought the typeface should be used and interpreted the typeface in my own way.

From first sight looking at Chantal it instantly made me think of a Louis Vuitton design that was used on handbags a few years back and also on some of their shop displays, I thought I could recreate a similar thing for my design. As well as reminding me of the Louis Vuitton designs it also reminded me of some Chanel bottle designs that I have seen and pinned on Pinterest, luckily Chantal is a play on words with Chanel so I chose to do a fun, gimmicky play on Chanel with Chantal!

Chantal seems to me to be a typeface that doesn’t take itself too seriously! It looks like it has a lot of fun! I really enjoyed designing these pages for Chantal, it is probably one of y favourite layouts and it is definitely a typeface I shall use in my future designs!

Digital Development

I designed and created most of my design for this using Illustrator and Photoshop. I started off by designing the left side page first. The first page was inspired by the Louis Vuitton design and I had the vision of the first page filled with pure type. I typed out my text how I wanted it (I used the words Fresh, energetic, youthful, fun and lively as this is how the typeface was described on Adobe Fonts) and I repeated the words across the page, I converted them all into shapes so that I could adjust the colours further and move elements if I needed to. Using a black background and a vivid hot pink gave the design contrast and made it look really modern and eye catching. This design is clearly going to be aimed at women, I am not sure that the typeface is aimed at Females specifically but that is how I have interpreted it.

The next stage was to design the “Chanel” play on words part of the design. I decided to draw out one of the famous Chanel No5 perfume bottles in Illustrator but change the name to “Chantal no5”, London (where the typeface was made) and Eau de Type. I really liked how it came out! I then added some effects to the bottle; I used the paint brush tool to create like bubbles of the perfume spraying out and I used part of the type and lowered the opacity to place it behind the perfume bottle to look like the bottle is filled with type. I am really pleased with how it all turned out!

I only came across one problem while creating this design (one that I was able to sort out easily). I accidentally created my Illustrator document in RGB which was good because it gave really vibrant colours but it is not suitable for print; my InDesign document was set to “Print” which meant that when I imported the Illustrator document over to InDesign it came out really dull. I changed the settings over and it soon fixed itself and the colours came out looking lovely again!

When I had created the pages in Illustrator I then exported them and imported them into InDesign to create the final layout. I added the text in white on the right hand side which gives information about the type and the designer.

Design Development

The Final design

The Final Mockup

If the face fits(Part 1: Type Specimen book) Frutiger

6th May 2021Leave a comment

Following on from Univers, I chose to do another famous typeface by Adrian Frutiger.

Frutiger is a Sans-Serif and was designed to be legible at any size. It was originally commissioned by Roissy Airport in Paris, (Charles De Gaulle) when it was first built to design all the signage in the airport. The airport wanted a new directional sign system. It was going to be named “Roissy” in 1972 after its success but was then Frutiger was approached to make the typeface suitable for print and it was then named after the designer himself.

The way forward for this layout design seemed quite obvious; to base it around signage and CDG airport. The first idea I had was to make the layout look like a baggage tag or boarding pass with the barcodes and airport names etc.. taking a little bit of inspiration from my Casetify Pangram phone case… My idea was to scan some barcodes in and then create another “swiss grit” style design.

CASETiFY iPhone 12 Case - Pangram Custom by Pangram Pangram

I did ask my boyfriend if he had any boarding passes kicking around from his visit to Dubai a few years back (I haven’t travelled abroad in a few years now!) and he did have one boarding pass that I managed to take a QR code from and import into my design;

I also keep a bag full of different cardboard and paper textures and barcodes and anything interesting I could potentially use in my designs; I found a relevant barcode that I could use.

I felt like I needed some images of airport signage next. I did not want to take images from the internet because they would be very low resolution and would ruin my clean, legible design. The only way I could use airport images in my work was to import a web image of a sign and then trace around it in Illustrator to produce a high quality vector image. I did this for a plane and an arrow.

After I had collected these bits I decided to just take it straight into Adobe to try and make into a layout for the typeface. As you can see from the design development, It took me several attempts to get to the final piece! I had a lot of design elements to cram onto one page and I wanted to keep it as clean and as minimal as I could so it was a case of moving elements around the page to see what worked the best. I wanted the design to flow and to not be “too busy”. I think the version I decided on works the best.

Design Development – stages to the final design!

These are all the development stages I had to go through before I reached the final design.

If the face fits(Part 1: Type Specimen book) Helvetica

6th May 20216th May 2021Leave a comment

Pages 1-2: Helvetica (Sans-Serif)

When you think of Sans-Serif there is only one typeface that comes to mind immediately and that is Helvetica. Helvetica is possibly a designers all time favourite. It was designed in 1957 in a new world after the war where the need for function over beauty prevailed. There was a need for clarity, function, cleanliness and for text to be readable, legible and straight forward communicating. The mantra was “less is more” and “form follows function”. The focus became on the content rather than the design and any ornate detailing. The designs of the time were very mathematical; Designers of the time designed religiously around the grid. Bauhaus at the time was also a massive influence.

For this design I wanted to represent everything that this typeface stands for; minimalism, cleanliness, Swiss designed and legible. I started off by doing some intensive research into the typeface; I used Pinterest as I always do to look at lots of type specimen books that already exist for Helvetica. I watched the film Helvetica again, I bought a book all about the history of Helvetica.. I really went deep with the research!

I noticed that a lot of type specimen books use “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” to showcase their typefaces with the different styles/weights/widths etc.; I did not want to do that. It just did not fit in with the feel of the typeface at all! I was really making myself nervous about completing this double page layout for the fact that I wanted to do the typeface justice and didn’t want to design something awful. I decided to refresh myself on the typeface by re-watching the film “Helvetica” for some inspiration and ideas, It was from this that I got the idea to use one of the quotes from the film;

You can say, “I love you,” in Helvetica. And you can say it with Helvetica Extra Light if you want to be really fancy. Or you can say it with the Extra Bold if it’s really intensive and passionate, you know, and it might work.
Massimo Vignelli

I decided it would be a good idea to use this on my main design to replace “The Quick Brown Fox”. I actually used Helvetica Extra Light and Extra Bold when I wrote the quote to show the different styles and weights of Helvetica on my type specimen page.

I used Red as the dominant colour and the red Swiss cross in my design to represent the origins of Helvetica.

I then started to lay everything out onto my pages and reorganise. I wanted a lot of negative space. It needed to be minimal and to not be ornate in any way.

Design Development – The stages of reaching my final design and layout!

I was really happy with how my final design and layout turned out and it was also well received on social media when I uploaded it to my college Instagram page!