The Typography II class I’m taking this spring is wrapping up, so I thought I’d share a couple of the projects I did for it. This is a brochure I made for the local outdoor/military surplus store I posted about a few weeks ago. The folds of the brochure were designed to reflect their logo and brand identity.
Always loved the geometric work of London based designer, Simon Page. A few samples from his Futurism and International Year of Chemistry poster series. The repeated shapes, patterns and typography create a rhythm that helps unify the design across each series.
This week we’re studying the grid system and starting a brochure design assignment, so I thought I’d find an example for the blog that encompassed both things. This synth pop festival brochure is by Argentinian designer, Patricio Murphy.
The basic structure for the grid is dictated by the folds, so he ends up with 6 columns and 2 rows. Within each of those larger columns (the folds) he then fluidly changes things up—sometimes subdividing it into two, three or even four more columns depending on content.
The thing that really excites me about this design is how he activates the grid by blending elements from one column into others every now and then. Really creates some dynamics in the layout that keep it from being too rigid and repetitive.
This week we’re looking at the principle of unity in typography and graphic design. These examples are from the magazine, User, designed by Ames Bros. as a guide for Virgin mobile phone users. Ames Bros. used a consistent, limited color palette, abstracted imagery (generally of two tones), and repeated graphic shapes lines, shapes and patterns to create a style that’s interesting enough to grab and hold reader attention, but still unified enough to feel cohesive throughout each volume of the magazine.
This week we’re posting logos and marks and one I came across the other day that really stood out was for a local military surplus/outdoor store, Champaign Surplus. Recently, the owners sold the store to their daughter, Shira Epstein, who happened to be a graphic designer by trade—Trillium Creative—and she handled the rebranding herself. I thought the new logo—a military dog tag shape and the star and stripes from a sergeant major insignia tweaked into a mountain range—was brilliantly conceived and executed.
This week we’re looking at asymmetrical designs and that made me think of these vintage Porsche posters from the 60’s and 70’s (don’t know who the designers of these are). If you’re gonna do racing posters, they can’t be static. They’ve got to be dynamic and exploding with movement. Love the use and emphasis of the diagonals in these posters to help amplify that movement. Also the dynamic variation is text size—from the massive display type to the minuscule body type. These look just as fresh and exiting today as they did fifty years ago.
Always been a huge fan of the illustrator, Ashely Wood. Something a lot of people might not know is that over the past four or five years Ash has been focusing on his toy company, 3A Toys. He designs all the figures, handles all the promotional imagery and provides all the illustrations and graphic design for the packaging (his partner in 3A handles the sculpting and production of the figures).
For me, buying a 3A toy isn’t just about getting a cool figure. It’s about the amazing packing it comes in. The cool posters and accessories that come with it. It’s character design, graphic design, package design, illustration, and typography all expressed through a single product. After I buy something from 3A, I’m just as excited to display the packaging and poster that came with it as the figure I bought. Ash’s graphic design work for 3A was a big part of my inspiration in wanting to take typography classes and see how I could apply more graphic design elements to my work.
For this week’s post, we’re looking at negative space in typography. Always thought Ash had a brilliant sense of composition and use of negative space in both his illustrations and his typography. While I love Ash’s illustrations on their own, I think his typography enhances them in a way that elevates them to a whole new level.
This week’s post features the work of hungarian designer, Áron Jancsó. Love the way his typographic imagery creates such an amazing sense of pattern and texture. Almost like modernist graffiti.
The examples for this week’s post all feature reversed-out type—or light type printed over a darker background. Common to each image is the use of a sans serif typeface—no serifs to close up when ink from the background spreads into the space the white letterforms should occupy. A bold typeface is prominent throughout each piece, though many of the images do incorporate book, light or condensed typefaces. All of the reversed type in these examples is placed over backgrounds with a darker value—even if it’s a photograph with variations in the tone, it’s always a darker value than the white type to make sure the type is legible.
Lord of the Flies book cover design by Bráulio Amado
Uranus poster by Ross Berens
Funny Games poster design by Akiko Stehrenberger
Cardon Webb designed a new series of covers for these Ralph Ellison novels. Before turning to writing, Ellison was a jazz trumpeter, and that was part of Webb’s inspiration for this series—focusing on the 1940’s–50’s jazz era and the record sleeves of that time. This week’s blog assignment was to find “typography with a voice.” The type in these covers obviously harkens back to the typography of those old jazz covers, and has a fun, playful vibe to it.
