Chapter 4 is all about how to create legibility within
typography. While I do agree that legibility is important, there are definitely
times when it can be played around with more so than others. In the case of
signs and things that are solely for just telling you something you need to
know, I think it is important to keep it simple. Whereas when you have
something more artistic and fun like a poster for a music festival you have
more room to breathe and play around with how the type is placed and looks. But like the book says, it is important that
even if you are making things that have a more artistic feel that you don’t
distort and sort of type face because that will destroy the entire thing and
will never end up looking good. While there are many things that have been and
will continue to be argued, like whether serif vs sans-serif fonts are more
readable, or the spacing between letters, I think that a lot of things really
can come down to a matter of personal opinion and what each individual finds
aesthetically pleasing, and of course, what the type is being used for. One
thing I do agree is straight forward, regardless of who is reading it, is the
use of color. It was really interesting to me to see all the different options
of the color of font and color of background and how big of a difference that
can really make. I’ve definitely seen webpages and advertisements where the
color choice has been questionable before so this was cool to see and read the
thoughts and ideas behind it. I’ve also never really thought about how certain
type faces will be more or less legible based on certain colors, so that was a
very interesting fact for me to learn as well.
Chapter 5 goes into the framework behind typography and how
to set up and place things based on what you are trying to portray and what it
is going to be used for. I think that the framework of a design is one of the
most important things when it comes to typography because it is what holds
every together and makes everything look put together and make sense to the
viewer. One thing this chapter touches on is how all type has some sort of
directional quality and this is something I’ve learned in past classes and
definitely thing is an important thing to remember. If you ignore the
directional qualities of type when creating something, it can throw off your
entire design and could create something confusing for the viewer. Another
thing that’s touched on is playing with proportion. In past classes, one thing
we really focused on was trying to keep things from being symmetrical. I really
liked seeing all the ways a square could be split up to create different
spatial divisions because I’ve never really looked at the classic grid and
thought about how you could just take out some lines to see all these different
options. A very helpful thing that I didn’t know before reading this is
learning when it is better to use each type of grid, whether it be multi-column
grids, single-column grids, and modular grids. What I found the most
interesting was learning about improvisational structures because this is the
type of thing that I find fun and enjoy doing things with this type of
structure as opposed to something more straight forward. Like I mentioned
before, in past classes we focused very much on keeping everything we created asymmetrical
so reading about how that is typically what a improvisational structure really
led me to a better understanding of really creating the framework behind the
type of design that I find really interesting and exciting.
No comments:
Post a Comment