Week Four: What's Your Type?

I've actually really been looking forward to learning about Typography because ever since I learned what it was (through the always-wise Graphic Designer boyfriend) I've been fascinated with it. I've always noticed things like fonts, and what's an effective use of them, so the blog assignment this week was perfect: look for 3 designs and analyze their typography components.

I scoured the depths of the internet for my examples, but I didn't have to go much farther than my own backyard to find examples of typography in use. They might require a bit of setting up, so bear with me through my explanations.

This first example comes to me from the world of LiveJournal (yes, I have another blog, gasp!). I belong to a community (forum) there where people submit their secrets anonymously. The interesting thing about this group is that they edit images and put text over top of them to better communicate their secrets. The *fun* thing about this is that everyone submitting is amateur, so many of them have no idea of design concepts whatsoever. This is one of those people:

Okay, while this guy did do something cool with the colour, I'm not talking about that this week! I don't know what he was thinking when he chose this particular decorative font for his text, but if it was "Gee, I really hope this is totally unreadable when I'm done," MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! Decorative fonts are meant to be used sparingly, such as in a headline or to emphasize one particular word in a body of normal text - not all right next to each other. As you can easily see this is an assault on the eyes, and the fact that it's in all capital letters doesn't make it any better, since that's even harder for the human eye to read. The only thing I can think of is that the author/artist was trying to be playful and cute with his message, but it gets lost in translation.

This next one is a video from the lovely YouTube. You wouldn't think you'd be able to find interesting uses of font on a video site, but you just have to know where to look! This particular style of video is called Kinetic Typography, which (in my layman's grasp of the idea) means animating text so it represents both what the text is describing and how it's being said. This video is animating a scene from Superbad.

Yes, there is swearing, so I'm giving a warning right now, make sure your headphones are plugged in, or you're somewhere where people don't mind a bit of foul language before playing this video!



This is a particularly clever use of fonts since the different type groups are used to differentiate between the three different characters. There's the Sans Serif for Fogell (or McLovin), Serif for Evan and Decorative for Seth. The type groups are also used to illustrate how the characters talk, Fogell in a more subdued passive tone - using the sans serif uncapitalized, Evan for a more grammatically correct medium tone - using the serif capitalized, and Seth for an obnoxious yelling tone - using the all caps decorative font. There are also font changes to emphasize important parts of the scene such as "McLovin" which is also blown up to illustrate its ridiculousness, and Fake IDs, which is what the conversation centers around.

In general, kinetic typography is interesting because it works almost purely with fonts to give the viewer a unique view of how a script or song lyrics play out simply based on the text. Pausing on words or transforming certain words into other shapes use the reader's eye to its fullest potential, instead of wasting it on using visual images simply to show how the events are transpiring. I personally think it adds an extra layer of humor onto this example, having already seen the movie.

My final example comes to you from the fabled boyfriend! This is his website - Check it out for more coolness!

The boyfriend belongs to a community where people design DVD covers for movies that already exist or are in the process of being released. It's a way for him to practice his design techniques while he looks for work in the big city, so I thought I'd use him as one of my examples since he loves typography and responsible for most of my knowledge regarding it.

The idea behind this DVD cover is closely tied in with the plot of the movie - a guy (Jason Statham) gets poisoned has to keep his heartrate up or he'll die. Basically like Speed, but with a person. My boyfriend (also named Jason) used the repetetion of the big blocky font (hey - a CRAP theory too!) to illustrate the high-enery fast paced tone of the film, going hand in hand with its actual title, not to mention filling the text with particularly memorable stills. Another neat thing about his design choice was to insert the names of the lead actors in the midst of all the busyness of the cover. The eye almost doesn't register them at first, but once it does, it makes the reader go back trying to figure out what they missed. I may be biased, but I did watch him go through the process of designing the cover, and this design appealed to me the most in the way it related to the plot/premise of the film.

So as you can probably guess, I'm pretty into Typography and will do my best to employ it in my designs!