Monday, July 9th, 2007
Today was our last day with Karen Moyer who was a great teacher. We covered our final exercises and discussed the benefits of different formats and some general rules on establishing page margins. The morning ended with a brief discussion on legibility, line length, kerning, and how leading affects legibility.
Some general notes
- Let the content drive the design and organization. Don’t attempt to apply meaning – let the content’s inherent information come through. Design to expose the greatest amount of information the easiest way.
- Always try to do more with less. The fewer moves you make, the more efficient and elegant the solution.
- Some things are logical, some things are visual. Good solutions find the middle ground of remaining logical and being visually interesting and elegant.
- Don’t always seek to only find the solution. Sometimes wrong moves are more valuable and inform your decisions more than right moves.
We also began descending into the depths of Photoshop today. We begin working with photography tomorrow (or at least learning about photography).
Some of us went to see Sicko tonight. Everyone should see this movie. If nothing else, it might change who you vote for in 2008. The United States must change how it handles healthcare and that change must come from the bottom up.
Posted in CMU, Design, Elections, Living, Summer, Typography | No Comments »
Saturday, July 7th, 2007
Another successful morning critique on Friday, along with some additional discussion about typography and typographic/visual variables with Karen Moyer.
Typographic Variables to Remember
- Structure
- The forms of the letters. Think one-story “a” vs two-story “a”.
- Proportion
- Height to width ratio.
- Shape
- The nuances that give typefaces their flavor. Serif vs sans, stem to crossbar transitions, etc.
- Weight
- Stroke weight, defines the min & max of strokes within the same (optical) proportion. Light, Roman, Bold, Black.
- Size
- The amount of area the type occupies. 8pt, 12pt, 24pt, 60pt.
- Tone
- Variation within one color. Grayscale, duotone.
- Color
- Hue, Value, Saturation.
- Texture
- Variation or pattern of an element. Different printing methods can add texture (mezzotint, different line screens).
- Position
- Where on the format the element is placed.
- Orientation
- How the baseline orients to the format
Alex also brought everyone up to speed on typefaces and type families and why all typefaces are not created equal. Overall a very successful afternoon.
Looking back on the first week I’d declare it an immensely successful beginning to my graduate school experience.
Just a note: This idea for documenting my CMU experience comes directly from Dan Saffer’s blog about his time at CMU. In tribute, here is Dan’s Week 1 Wrap-Up from 2003.
Posted in CMU, Design, Summer, Typography | No Comments »
Thursday, July 5th, 2007
In Design Fundamentals
Back from the break and a busy day in class today. The first critique went well and everyone had good feedback and helpful questions.
Lots of similar answers were up on the board, but some definitely worked better than others. Subtle changes ended seeming much larger from far away, an issue I haven’t dealt with for the better part of a year.
We continued on our journey through basic typographic hierarchy and began exercises utilizing two variables instead of one – leaving a lot more room for exploration and clarification.
In Software Boot Camp
The afternoon was spent working with quotes from Pulp Fiction. It’s amazing to see how everyone interprets things differently. I had forgotten how much fun school can be when everyone has good input and good work that shows genuine thought and problem solving.
I’m fairly happy with my revised layout. Though I think the original layout is much busier than most of my work which intrigues me.
Posted in CMU, Design, Summer, Typography | 5 Comments »
Saturday, June 2nd, 2007
Has anyone else noticed the use of Trajan in movie marketing materials? It seems like 75% or more of the new movies I see trailers for use Trajan as some part of their branding.
Go to Blockbuster (despite having Netflix I visit the Blockbuster on occassion) and take a stroll around. Does your movie have something to do with Rome? – Trajan. Is it a horror flick? – Trajan.
Both of the current Netflix DVDs I have right now – The Illusionist and An Inconvenient Truth use Trajan on their DVD menus. This is especially amazing considering Trajan does not include any lowercase characters.
Now I’m not saying that Trajan isn’t a good typeface, I’ve used it before and I’ll use it again. But how can it seem appropriate for as many movies as have used it? Are movie branding experts just being lazy? Am I missing some magic that Trajan posseses?
Posted in Branding, Typography | 1 Comment »