Type specimen poster for my typography class. Wanted to show that though Franklin Gothic is often associated with newspaper headlines, it’s actually much more versatile and can feel cool and modern if applied that way. The typeface was named in honor of Benjamin Franklin, who was a printer by trade for more than thirty years. That printing association inspired the CMYK color palette of the piece.
Brilliant film posters by U.K. designers All City. Love the way they make type an integral part of the design—never an afterthought. Beautiful use of gestalt alignment in their typesetting. Predominately use Helvetica while display type looks to be set in Helvetica Black.
I just discovered the work of Ryan Atkinson through a poster project he did for Hype for Type. Love his style of typography where type is treated as an image (focal area of importance) and still conveys information. Big fan of graphic design that relies on typography and very little illustrative or design elements. It just lets the type carry the burden of the communicating the message.
My dad was having surgery last week at the Mayo Clinic, and as you often do in situations like that, I found myself with quite a bit of time on my hands while waiting around the hospital. I started to notice there were at least three versions of the Mayo Clinic logo. After some research I found that they’d gone through some rebranding over the last few years—going from a sans serif typeface in their logo to a classic serif. Couldn’t quite identify the typeface used for it. Appears to closely resemble Palatino Roman, but maybe with a “Y” from a different typeface swapped in.
Almost all traces of the sans serif logo were gone—exceptions seemed to be on items it would cost a lot to change, like automated lobby doors. Most of the signage directing you around the hospital featured the same serif typeface as the current logo.
This handicapped sign in the parking garage of St. Mary’s Hospital caught my eye. Wouldn’t have thought much of it except that I recognized the capital “Q” as being from the Avant Garde typeface (has that distinctive curly tail). Avant Garde seems like such clean, modern typeface that I was surprised to see it blend in so well surroundings with its surroundings.
In the comic book industry, typesetting is referred to as “lettering.” Letterers generally classify typefaces into two categories: balloon or display/sound effect (sfx).
The examples here come from Avengers: The Children’s Crusade #8. The typeface is a digital balloon font created by Chris Eliopoulos and I believe is based on his own hand-lettering. The lettering was done by Cory Petit of Eliopoulos’ lettering studio, Virtual Calligraphy.
Digital comic book fonts are designed to mimic traditional comic book hand-lettering, complete with all the inconsistencies of hand-lettering like subtle baseline and x-height shifts, kerning irregularities etc. “Tracking” (or letter spacing) refers to the overall space in a word or block of text. “Kerning” refers to the spacing between a pair of letters.
Good comic book lettering is invisible. You’re obviously aware you’re reading balloons and sfx, but they should NEVER take you out of the moment and stop your flow of reading the story.
As I read this issue, I came across the bold “YOUR” in the first balloon above and was immediately pulled out of the story by the bad kerning of the “Y” and “O”. Not only did I stop and notice the poor kerning in that word, I started looking at all the other balloons on the page to see their kerning. Absolutely killed the flow of the comic.
Chris Eliopoulos is a terrific letterer whom I have a lot of respect for and this post is in no way an indictment of him or his abilities. Just pointing out some things with this particular typeface that could use adjusting (see my tweaks in the image above) to increase its readability and avoid interrupting the flow of the comic.
One of the first projects we are doing in my typography class is a type specimen poster based on an assigned typeface. We had to research the history of the typeface and designer and incorporate that information in the upcoming poster. Part of the assignment involves posting our finding to our blogs for critique.Very educational researching this and I honestly wish I had the time (or more assignments like it) to research all the “classic” typefaces. Here’s the copy for my poster and a sample of the typeface for reference:
Franklin Gothic is an extra bold sans serif typeface that is built upon traditional roman letter features. Classified as a “Grotesque” (or “Grotesk”) typeface, a category of early sans serif designs that originated in the nineteenth century. At one point, “Gothic” was defined as “non classical”–meaning not greek or roman. Early American type designers adapted this term to refer to sans serif (non classical) typefaces as “Gothic”. Nowadays, gothic, grotesque and sans serif are frequently used synonymously.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of Franklin Gothic is the thinning of the stroke where the bold stems join the rounds (see the shoulder stroke of the “n”). Like most grotesque typefaces, it features a slight degree of contrast between thick and thin strokes in the letterforms, and the lowercase utilizes the double-story roman “g” and “a”.
Franklin Gothic was designed by American typeface designer, Morris Fuller Benton in 1902. During Benton’s thirty plus years as head of the design department for American Type Founders (ATF), he designed in excess of 200 typefaces, including Broadway, Bank Gothic and ATF Bodoni (the first American revival of the typeface in 1909).
The typeface was named in honor of Benjamin Franklin, who was a typesetter and printer by trade before he became a noted author, scientist, inventor and statesman. Though named in his honor, the Franklin Gothic has no relationship to his handwriting or any typefaces he may have used during his thirty year printing career.
Originally cut in a single-weight, extra bold, International Typeface Corporation (ITC) currently offers 20 different typestyles of Franklin Gothic.
For part of the typography class I’m currently taking, we’ve got to put up a weekly post about the typography and typefaces we encounter in our everyday lives. It might be a sign we encounter on the street, a logo on a restaurant napkin or a image we see on the web. The idea is to become more aware of the type that’s all around us and familiarize ourselves with the qualities of good typography.
Oh and cut me some slack if all my terminology isn’t quite accurate. I know the basics, but have a long way to go.
Something that caught my eye this week was a cover to an issue of Midwest Living my mom had laying around her house. I have always been a sans serif guy and decided that as part of this class I’d push myself out of my comfort zone and experiment with more serif and script typefaces. Think that’s why I noticed this cover, as it actually features all three: a logo with serifs, a script headline, and sans-serif sub-headline.
The Midwest Living logo is set in Bodoni Poster Compressed. The specific version of Bodoni they’re using seems to have a little more radius in the serifs than the one I have. They’ve also tightened the tracking and flipped the ear of the “g” up to match the ball of the “i”‘s.
The sans serif typeface in the sub-headline is Frutiger 67 Bold Condensed. I was able to identify it as Frutiger based of the tail of the uppercase “Q” and the shape of the lowercase “s” and “,”.
I wasn’t able to identify the script typeface used to set “Sweet summer”.
One of the other things that struck me about the way this type was set is the interesting gestalt alignment. “Sweet summer” is set the same length as “Midwest”. The “w” of sweet and the “B” of best are both vertically aligned with the last stem of the “M” in midwest. I could go on, but you can see the alignments for yourself.
