Typography lecture, part one
Oct. 26th, 2008 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nonionayOkay, here is my official first foray into informative blogging. Please, critique me, because I've always been crap at writing well-organized non-fiction essays.
The purpose of typography is to communicate clearly. The type you're looking at right now communicates little relative to the type itself. The clarity of information is mostly limited to my own writing skills and possibly the font settings of your browser. (Are you trying to read this in dark red type on a black background? Are you masochistic?) But with the magic of typography, I could emphasize different points (as I will farther down. Behold the power of lists!) That involves more subtle stuff that I'll talk about later. For now, I'm going to start with type you see everyday, in branding and logos. Everyone wants to communicate with us for their own purposes. In the case of most logos, they want our money. Obama, with his distinctive logo, wants our vote. (And I'm not dissing him for that. I can't think of any other candidates who've used typography, graphic design and the marketing arts like he has. The guy knows what he's doing.)
The logo as complex, digging into our brains.
Psychologist Carl Jung talks about complexes. (I'm only talking about Jung for a paragraph, I swear!) These aren't just the Freudian notion of our repressed desires to screw the parent of appropriate gender, but wads of images and ideas worked around an archetypal core. I like to think of archetypes as the shape of a crystal--not the crystal itself, but the idea of a cube (in the case of salt) that the crystal is built around. So Obama takes the "O" from his name, which itself is a nice, roundly lettered name, and turns it into a sunrise. He takes the enormous corpus of symbolism that goes with the circle, one of the purest archetypal forms there is. That's the core of his crystal. That swoosh looks like fields--heartland of America and all that brings with it. But it's also dynamic, progressive. (And even interactive!) He's packed a whole lot into one simple symbol, and everything in it is going to resonate with us in some way. Blah blah we've got all the archetypes hard wired into us. I swear this is the end of the Jung paragraph.
Communication--content
So what are a few things we can communicate:
Emotion
Information
Cultural impressions (Class, subculture, etc. For instance, in this day and age, if you write something in rainbow colors, a lot of people are going to think you're talking about gay people. Others will think you're addressing children and will completely miss the gay reference.)
Go to this page full of knock-off logo fonts * and scroll down the list. Look at each logo and consider what kind of message it's trying to put across.
There are messy ones, like se7en, 28 Days Later or Pink Floyd. Disturbed looks disturbed. Some are clean and classy, like Nautica and Pontiac. Just glancing down the list, you can probably get a sense of what the move/band/product is. The techy stuff looks techy, the fantasy stuff looks fantastic. Tales From the Crypt drips blood in a cheap and cheesy manner, just like the show.
Notice that Little Nicky, Diablo and Queensryche all have a similar font, and are possibly going for a similar audience.
Some, like Nintendo, don't give an impression either way, but you've seen them so much, it doesn't matter.
Notice the difference between Yahoo!'s fun and carefree look and the United States Post's clean, no-nonsense look. But we don't want our postal service to be too rigid-- we want our mail to move, after all--and so the logo is angled yet flows together nicely. Notice how the "S" in "States" flows right into the top of the "T"? If you look at the "S" in other logos, how do they compare? Scrabble is blocky--literally in boxes. And the top of the S curves down, limiting the forward motion of your eye. Snickers also has a downward pointing S, but makes up for it by keeping the letters tight and tilted.
If I were to write "Coca Cola" on a sheet of paper, you'd know the product I was referring to, but probably not the reason I did it. If I wrote it in the familiar type style, you'd assume you were being advertised to. If I used that same typeface to write, "Capitalism," you might think I was communicating something more complicated.
The Importance of Consistency.
Big companies have to be careful about changing their brands. If suddenly, no one recognizes their brand, they've lost a lot. Check out the changes in some familiar logos. In all the cases, they kept some things the same--Burger King sandwiched between a stylized bun, etc.
The blogger complains about the loss of the lovely gridded days of yore. One of the reasons for this is undoubtedly technology. Once upon a time, we had to lay out everything by hand, literally cutting and pasting. Grids were a typographer's friend back then. Nowadays, we've got computer programs that can make much more complicated work easy, and the cost of multi-color printing is going down.
Anyway, back to the importance of consistency and typography.
Seattle Weekly has a nice, simple logo. But a while back, they decided to rebrand themselves, and came up with a wild, jagged and angular font that immediately dated them. That style would last a year, if that. Not to mention it damaged their look as a serious paper. Maybe they wanted to look fun and trendy, but it didn't work, and they very rapidly changed back. It probably helped that The Stranger, the rival weekly, briefly changed their own style to Seattle Weekly's to make fun of it.
Here, I've talked about logos and flashy type--stuff anyone can recognize. Stuff that banks on its recognizability. Next time I'm going to talk about the purpose of more subtle forms of typography. The stuff you don't notice, the stuff you're not supposed to notice.
* Yes, not all the fonts are accurate (what's up with that Jerry Springer font?) but it gives a general sense for most of them.
The purpose of typography is to communicate clearly. The type you're looking at right now communicates little relative to the type itself. The clarity of information is mostly limited to my own writing skills and possibly the font settings of your browser. (Are you trying to read this in dark red type on a black background? Are you masochistic?) But with the magic of typography, I could emphasize different points (as I will farther down. Behold the power of lists!) That involves more subtle stuff that I'll talk about later. For now, I'm going to start with type you see everyday, in branding and logos. Everyone wants to communicate with us for their own purposes. In the case of most logos, they want our money. Obama, with his distinctive logo, wants our vote. (And I'm not dissing him for that. I can't think of any other candidates who've used typography, graphic design and the marketing arts like he has. The guy knows what he's doing.)
The logo as complex, digging into our brains.
Psychologist Carl Jung talks about complexes. (I'm only talking about Jung for a paragraph, I swear!) These aren't just the Freudian notion of our repressed desires to screw the parent of appropriate gender, but wads of images and ideas worked around an archetypal core. I like to think of archetypes as the shape of a crystal--not the crystal itself, but the idea of a cube (in the case of salt) that the crystal is built around. So Obama takes the "O" from his name, which itself is a nice, roundly lettered name, and turns it into a sunrise. He takes the enormous corpus of symbolism that goes with the circle, one of the purest archetypal forms there is. That's the core of his crystal. That swoosh looks like fields--heartland of America and all that brings with it. But it's also dynamic, progressive. (And even interactive!) He's packed a whole lot into one simple symbol, and everything in it is going to resonate with us in some way. Blah blah we've got all the archetypes hard wired into us. I swear this is the end of the Jung paragraph.
Communication--content
So what are a few things we can communicate:
Emotion
Information
Cultural impressions (Class, subculture, etc. For instance, in this day and age, if you write something in rainbow colors, a lot of people are going to think you're talking about gay people. Others will think you're addressing children and will completely miss the gay reference.)
Go to this page full of knock-off logo fonts * and scroll down the list. Look at each logo and consider what kind of message it's trying to put across.
There are messy ones, like se7en, 28 Days Later or Pink Floyd. Disturbed looks disturbed. Some are clean and classy, like Nautica and Pontiac. Just glancing down the list, you can probably get a sense of what the move/band/product is. The techy stuff looks techy, the fantasy stuff looks fantastic. Tales From the Crypt drips blood in a cheap and cheesy manner, just like the show.
Notice that Little Nicky, Diablo and Queensryche all have a similar font, and are possibly going for a similar audience.
Some, like Nintendo, don't give an impression either way, but you've seen them so much, it doesn't matter.
Notice the difference between Yahoo!'s fun and carefree look and the United States Post's clean, no-nonsense look. But we don't want our postal service to be too rigid-- we want our mail to move, after all--and so the logo is angled yet flows together nicely. Notice how the "S" in "States" flows right into the top of the "T"? If you look at the "S" in other logos, how do they compare? Scrabble is blocky--literally in boxes. And the top of the S curves down, limiting the forward motion of your eye. Snickers also has a downward pointing S, but makes up for it by keeping the letters tight and tilted.
If I were to write "Coca Cola" on a sheet of paper, you'd know the product I was referring to, but probably not the reason I did it. If I wrote it in the familiar type style, you'd assume you were being advertised to. If I used that same typeface to write, "Capitalism," you might think I was communicating something more complicated.
The Importance of Consistency.
Big companies have to be careful about changing their brands. If suddenly, no one recognizes their brand, they've lost a lot. Check out the changes in some familiar logos. In all the cases, they kept some things the same--Burger King sandwiched between a stylized bun, etc.
The blogger complains about the loss of the lovely gridded days of yore. One of the reasons for this is undoubtedly technology. Once upon a time, we had to lay out everything by hand, literally cutting and pasting. Grids were a typographer's friend back then. Nowadays, we've got computer programs that can make much more complicated work easy, and the cost of multi-color printing is going down.
Anyway, back to the importance of consistency and typography.
Seattle Weekly has a nice, simple logo. But a while back, they decided to rebrand themselves, and came up with a wild, jagged and angular font that immediately dated them. That style would last a year, if that. Not to mention it damaged their look as a serious paper. Maybe they wanted to look fun and trendy, but it didn't work, and they very rapidly changed back. It probably helped that The Stranger, the rival weekly, briefly changed their own style to Seattle Weekly's to make fun of it.
Here, I've talked about logos and flashy type--stuff anyone can recognize. Stuff that banks on its recognizability. Next time I'm going to talk about the purpose of more subtle forms of typography. The stuff you don't notice, the stuff you're not supposed to notice.
* Yes, not all the fonts are accurate (what's up with that Jerry Springer font?) but it gives a general sense for most of them.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-06 03:21 am (UTC)Can't wait till the next installment (or maybe I don't have to - I'm catching up on about 200 entries, so maybe you've already posted). ^_^