Fall 2017 | Throughout the Semester
Hierarchy is one of the most important things for creating effective pieces, as the audience must be directed to look at certain thing before others. I explored six ways of using hierarchy with typography. The use of size and placement are the main ways to create hierarchy in a piece. There is also the use of Gestalt principles within these works as it make the designs stronger.
Alignment was the next area that needed to be discussed. whether the text is aligned left and jagged right or aligned right and jagged left, will make a huge difference in the work. Making a body of text justified can look nice of the page but can be difficult to read, this is why most large bodies of text in the English speaking world is aligned left with jagged right. For my two works I had to create a pro and con list for a controversial topic. I chose nuclear energy as my topic. I used alignment to create a line that runs vertically through the piece to make sure it was not a boring page of text all left aligned and right jagged one after another, as well as size hierarchy for my composition.
Form and counter form is one part of the Gestalt principle. One must think about the white space left behind as it is a part of the whole composition and without thought it can through the balance off. For my Form and Counter Form project I chose the contrasting words abundance and lack to play with. I cut and add large amount of black area to them to create a balanced composition. Clearly there is the rookie mistake of typography, morphing the letters unnaturally, in the word abundance. It is always good to reflect upon past mistakes as being able to reflect upon mistakes is where one learns not to repeat them in the future.
For the first typography semester final I worked on pieces that could be posted on Instagram or other social media platforms. The #metoo movement had started at this point and the purpose of these pieces were to have someone post the image due to being a part of the movement or supporting it. Unfortunately I did get these images out to the public for their use. The phrase that is repeated is Stand up. Speak up. Never shut up. For many of these works the phrase is simplified to never shut up. I created the #metoo type logo for each of the pieces.
Looking back at these works after taking other graphic design courses I realize it could have been made more simple to be effective. Making the # with the diagonal lines and the rest a sans serif would have worked much better, than using the diagonal line within the words of metoo. Also the s in shut up is not clean and could be more successful if I took a few cuts of the matching s in the font that was chosen for the rest of the works. I focused too much on trying to match the angles and lost the natural form that the s has.
Comments