Thursday 2 December 2010

Breaking Typography Rules

We got 10 rules of typography and we had to break them. I loved this as I always want to break the rules, so I immediately wanted to jump the gun and make a poster breaking every single rule, then I thought I should take the time to break a few at a time, because by breaking them you learn to understand them, and I found out some really good ways to break the rules that make them look better than when you abide by them, which is just plain boring.

So my A3 poster, using song lyrics. I used All Signs Point To Lauderdale by A Day To Remember 'cos i've been listening to it none stop since I got their new album. This poster shows me breaking the rules of: putting the header large and at the top of the page, never using all capitals in the main body of text, never use over 8pt or 10pt for main body text and subtly applying stress onto certain words. So, obviously to break these rules, I placed the header at an angle near the bottom of the page, made all the main body of text in capitals, made the font size of the main body text over 10pt, and put a ridiculous and completely unsubtle amount of stress on the necessary parts:


I looked at this and because I'm a perfectionist I wanted every part to be where it looked best, so I needed to make a couple of changed to this. I wasn't sure that I liked the way the last two letters of the "THAT" and "FIT" don't quite fit into the "2," even though there is some irony there which I quite like. I changed the size of this opening verse/chorus so that it didn't overlap the 2.

I also thought the kerning needed to be changed so when I edited it I changed it to -75 and I think it looks way better. The letters in the inside of the top of the 2 was annoying me because I wanted it to look like it was layered onto the other side of the numbers, and taking this into account meant there should not be letters on left side of the letters, so I changed this too; I also brought the main body text down to the bottom of the 2 as I think it looked like it flowed more instead of being cut off like on the one immediately above.

To me it kind of looks like the top right part has been teared off and the rest is on a page in front of it. I love the boldness of the numbers and I put stress on these parts because at the end of the opening on the verse in the song it counts to 4 and I made the numbers get bigger because the singer shouts each number louder.

Wednesday 1 December 2010

I LOVE this guy's posters.

have a deeks: http://www.ibraheemyoussef.com/work.html

Buy Nothing Day

Right so this was a brief to try and advertise and persuade the public to not spend money on the 27th November, as it's Buy Nothing Day. I'm a stubborn larl bastard and I knew that if somebody told me to day this by giving me a flyer or showing me a poster I wouldn't do it, it'd have to be something I went away and looked into myself. 
Keeping this in mind I decided to make it so that the poster/leaflet's purpose was to get people to look on the website and read about it themselves, and then decide wether they liked the ideas behind it (www.buynothingday.co.uk) and whether they would want to contribute. 
Also taking into consideration that there must be more stubborn people out there than me, I decided to create the slogan "I Double Dare You" because if I'm ever dared to do something, I'll want to do it just to spite the person who dared me. So all I included on my posters was that slogan and the website, so people would see the "dare" and be intrigued by it and go on it, and form their own opinion. 

Anyway, here are my final ideas.


This is like the 5th one of these because I wasn't happy with the first ones and I don't really like this one that much but I do like the way the orange and the yellow on the card and scissors stand out because they're in focus and rest isn't, I think it looks quite good. I experimented with the text down along the bottom and up the side and ended up with it just like this. 


Then I went onto photoshop and decided just to mess about with text and colour.
Right so this one was basically just Helvetica (<333) in really bold text with the website in red, so it's eye-catching and so the viewer knows that's it's additional information to the dare that they know nothing about (YET!).
I changed the kerning of the text because it is not until I found out about kerning that I realised how horrible looking the default text is on computers. 

Below is the same font, colours etc but I added a white brush to it, giving it an almost mysterious effect. Kind of. I thought this looked quite cool and it adds to the whole unknown dare thing:


The one below was just an idea that came to me when I'd ran out of ideas with the black and red. I like the way it's quite in your face and busy and then at the bottom in the white space there's just the website. I originally had the red at the bottom in the middle but it didn't stand out enough so I made it smaller and put it in a blank white space:



I used the green and grey that www.buynothingday.co.uk uses for these:



 I think the top one looks like some sort of xbox advert. I like the bottom one because I think the green just looks really nice with the grey. 
I think although there is only one bit of text and it is in the bottom right, it looks really effect because the way I view it is that people read from lift to right and top to bottom, so if you have a basically blank page but then something across the bottom, (especially the bottom right) then the viewer will take in the whole page, because that is the way their eye automatically views things, rather than placing it at the top of the page with nothing underneath, as there eye won't take in the rest of the page.