This week, we are learning about the basics of typography, which I have always been fascinated about. Reading Ellen Lupon’s guide on letters gave me a sense of how typefaces and letterforms are talked about and solidified my understanding on type. I was surprised (but also glad) to find out that there is a difference between “font” and typeface, as I have always used these two words interchangeably. Watching her lecture on typography and feeling also prompted me to think more about the emotions that a specific typeface is capable to invoke. I really enjoyed when she talked about the binaries that exist within typography, such as femine style vs. masculine style and serif vs. san serif. I think it’s good to follow a guideline when I am just getting into type, but her remarks on these binaries inspired me to be more conscious of the unnecessary divide it creates among different type families.
The Helvetica documentary furthered my views on the difference of perceptions people have towards typefaces. Specifically in the case of Helvetica, it went through multiple stages of history where it oscillates between being a revolutionary type and a typeface that represents capitalism and the corporate. My biggest take away from the documentary is that there can be various perspectives when it comes to design, which makes it important for designers to have an intention behind their decisions.
This week, we are continuing our identity design assignment. We are asked to create a brandsheet with color, type, and size variations. First, I took last weeks feedback and went back to my logo. I knew that I needed to work on my colors and potentially make some edits for the shape. So I made some iterations:
To create more visual interest, I tried to make the left part of my logo to taper in and match with the curves on the right side. In terms of techniques, I think i could do better to match the curves, but to me, the shapes look a bit forced and unnatural. So I decided to go back to the original inward curve.
For colors, I decided to keep the second stripe transparent because it maintains the figure-ground relationship and holds the substrates better. So the decision is really between going monotone or using a red highlight color. I went with the red highlight because it fits with the star/sun cutout conceptually speaking.
From there, I went back and forth on picking fonts because there are just too many options. I narrowed it down to san serifs because I want to have a more modern and clean look. I landed on Arial Bold because of its simplicity and ubiquity, but then the bold look makes it stand out.
I also took advantage of illustrator’s grid and guidelines when I was creating my brand sheet to make sure that the layout looks as organized and clean as possible.
Anyway, here’s my brand sheet:
Full pdf here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QVSRUxYbHdaxgHKJFnkNCD64ebZRjD8x/view?usp=sharing
We were also asked to put our design on some products using photoshop. I followed the tutorial and created a displacement map for each photo, and then modified the blending mode, opacity, saturation as needed.
I chose a picture of me wearing a blank t-shirt, a tote bag, and a sachet bag just to switch things up. I think I definetly need more practice with this, but for now it looks decent.
Let me know if they look real :)
