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I realize it’s easy for me to download cool typographic illustrations but it’s a total pain in the ass to upload them. With my slow wi-fi, I have to upload each picture, wait, upload some more, find links, find the damn artist’s name, do spell check, pray my links work and link to the right websites, do some proof reading, blah, blah, blah.
Anyways, here are a bunch of type illustrations that I’ve been meaning to upload but never got the chance to.
I just finished reading this book in just a couple of hours. Actually I power skimmed it since I”m familiar with the majority of the concepts covered in the book. So what do I think of Designing with Type? Well it’s a book for beginners and an excellent reference for those who are a bit rusty with typography. As a matter of fact, I think this is one of the best books on introductory typography out there in the market. And on Amazon, it’s only $16.47!
The book is easy reading and can be finished in a couple of days. The book covers all the important basics of typography such as type terminology, historical classification systems, designing with text type and designing with display type.
What makes this book so great is that they when describing the historical classifications, the authors provide a specimen sheet for each of the historical categories. Thus, it’s nice to be able to compare the difference between an old style typeface like Garamond to a modern typeface like Bodoni. Other bonuses in this book is section on type projects and a short but useful type specimen sheet. The only thing I would complain about this book are the chapters on color and traditional skills like copyfitting. Granted the subject matter for these chapters aren’t normally covered in an introductory type book, but still, it would have been nice to have a bit more in-depth coverage on the subject matter. But aside from these minor negatives, this books is full of typographic goodness.
I haven’t posted an entry for typography Tuesday for a while. Sorry about that bloggers. Anyways, today typeface of the day is Zuzana Licko’s Mrs Eaves, a transitional serif typeface that is contemporary revival of John Baskerville’s work. Like most transitional typefaces based on Baskerville, Mrs Eaves has medium contrast in stroke weight, vertical stress and excellent proportions. If set correctly, Mrs Eaves is perfectly legible, readable and has an elegant appearance.
I just found a little catchy song on one of my favorite typefaces, Akzidenz Grotesk (aka the grandaddy of Helvetica).
I just found this flash site that allows you to input letter forms and it recreates it for you in little glowing dots. Looks fancy and fun.
Here is the fourth assignment from Intro to Graphic Design. For this assignment, we had to demonstrate our understanding of gestalt principles of closure, figure goodness and figure ground through the distortion of letterforms. The challenge here was that we had to push our distortions to the limit and yet these letterforms must still be readable.
For closure, I distorted the word “panda” by omitting certain strokes. My rational here was that I had to keep the ascenders and descenders of the p and d since they were the defining characteristics of these letterforms. For the n, I had to keep the top portion of the shoulder since that was the n’s defining characteristics. Lastly, the a was the toughest. Honestly, I think I showed too much of the a and could have distorted it more. As a matter of fact, people saw panda right away which shows that I could have pushed it a bit more. Oh well maybe next time.
For figure goodness, I had to take my initials and literally distort the letterforms to the point that it no longer looks like the letter but yet, it has to be readable. I have to say, this one was the toughest simply because if it is readable, then I wasn’t distorting the letters enough. However, if it couldn’t be read, then I went to far with my distortion. So for my piece, I took my initials which is jl and distorted the l so that it looked like a lung. Then I created a mirror image of that l and it then represented the j. I thought I had a pretty good idea but sadly no one got it except for Glen our mentor. So I redid it a bit by flattening the bottom and reducing the curve within the stems of the letterform.
For figure ground, we had to take two letters and combine them through a figure ground relationship. Honestly, I thought this one was going to be the hardest one to do but as it turns out, it was pretty easy. So for my piece, I kept it simple. I combined the uppercase H with the lowercase i. I have to say, of the three pieces I had to make for this assignment, this one is my favorite since it demonstrates the figure ground relationship so well (is it an H or is it an i in a black square).
I found a video of a guy smashing the H from Helvetica on Youtube. Me thinks this performance artist has anger management issues.
So I stumbled on a website that talked featured Corey Holms’ work. He’s the guy who worked on the logos for a lot of those big name Hollywood films. My favorite is the one he did for Lost in Translation and Where the Wild Things Are.
So lately, I’ve been a bad design student. Being sick with the flu, I’ve been doing nothing but lying in bed and watching reruns of Total Drama Action. Hence, I”m somewhat behind all my work and have been playing catch up since then.
One of my assignments that I have been neglecting is a logo that I have to crank out in the next couple of weeks. The logo I have to create is for the Japanese Restaurant Ebisu. So for the past couple of days, I”ve sketched 100 thumbnails, and sadly, 98 of those sketches were utter crap. Thus leaves me with only 3 ideas to work with. So now I”m in the process of turning those thumbnails into roughs and I’m starting to feel better about the project since I feel that I have some direction.
So this is my favorite rough so far. The idea here is that I wanted to give the logo a more contemporary appeal. Hence, I chose a calligraphic script called Harabara Hand which has an elegant yet casual feel. Also, the flow of the letterforms and the thick/thins of the strokes has a small semblance to East Asian calligraphy. In the eye of the letter e, I stuck a dot in there, hoping that people would see the eye as an abstract fish. I’m not 100% sure if it works. Maybe I need to look for another e?
MrBokChoi 