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Signage Research

Signs come in all different types of shapes, scales, materials and forms, therefore I wanted to research more into the types of signs and be more aware of the meaning of each type of sign.

The Square
The primary characteristic of a square sign is that it often symbolises an object within the shape, it communicates boundaries, the square almost forms protection to the object / icon within the shape.

The Triangle
The triangle can work in two important ways, when vertical it can direct movement. A simple vertical triangle is commonly used as a direction sign. Horizontal signs form an ideal sign for signals such as road signs this is down to a triangle symmetry, the horizontal base can convey stability and durability.

The Circle
A circle addresses a more strong approach than any other shape, the viewer often positions themselves inside or outside the circle, the circle is believed to certainly interact with the viewer the most because on a daily basis we come across horizontal and vertical objects but we tend to appreciate rounded forms.

Good signage / wayfinding compared to bad signage / wayfinding

This is Pentagrams wayfinding solution for one of London's best known and influential design colleges, the design is so simple yet effective because the main design triumph is how efficient the design is. Efficiency is accomplished by the signs being pinned to the boards, say if a lecture theatre or workshop block was to change location, the college could easily customise the wayfinding instead of overhauling the whole design. Pentagram achieved a successful wayfinding system, not just through design but functionality with the use of material and media. 

These two examples of bad signage and wayfinding is mainly down to bad kerning and too much content in my opinion. The kerning in the first example is totally off, the entire block of text is a mistake, personally I think the amount of content is too much for the viewer to take in while on the move. This example has proved the importance of kerning in wayfinding and how it can alter the viewers interpretation of an environment. The second example is another kerning mistake, this one doesn't have same occurring problem but has a big fault in the lettering of 'click' which makes it appear like 'dick'. I think the scaling of this piece may have caused this problem, so when designing my own wayfinding / signage I need to consider scaling pictograms and text so that they remain effect at any size.  

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Pictograms Research

A pictogram or also an icon, is an identity that conveys its meaning through its common resemblance to an object. Pictograms are often used in text and image systems in which the characters are to a considerable extent pictorial in appearance. Pictograms are commonly uses as a reference to the flat-styled, often coloured, simplistic ideas and objects, they've always been around in fact the earliest written languages were pictograms because of the use of conveying a meaning through simple pictures. In present day we use pictograms for all types of situations everyday but the use of digital interfaces has made pictograms more popular and subdued large amounts of content in interface layouts, this is efficient but the viewer has to be more aware of new/current pictograms.

When researching pictograms I wanted to look at the intention and purpose of different types of pictograms:

Indicative
Indicative is influencing thought and to informing the audience, but the viewer is left to make his or her own decision about how to act. For example this pictogram inform the viewer that he or she may smoke here but they don't have to smoke. Therefore it is unto the viewer receiving the information. 

Imperative 
Imperative is influencing the will of the audience,it intends to influence the behaviour of the viewer. The burning cigarette has a line through it therefore it intends to influence the receiver behaviour. Smoking is banned even though the viewer may feel like having a cigarette. 

Suggestive
Suggestive intends to influence feelings and make the viewer act in a certain way. The combination of the fist and the cigarette sets off feelings within the receiver. It represents an appeal to stop smoking for reasons of health.

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Wayfinding Research 

What is Wayfinding?
Wayfinding encompasses all of the ways in which people orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place. It is knowing where you are in a building or an environment, knowing where your desired location is, and knowing how to get there from your present location.

Semiotics
Semiotics is the study of meaning the study of sign processes and meaningful communication. This includes the study of signs and sign processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism , signification, and communication. Its a general theory of signs and symbolism, usually divided into the branches of pragmatics, semantics, and syntactics.

Pragmatics
The relation between signs and sign using agents or interpreters,especially words and other elements of language,and their users. Its mainly the relationship of sentences to the environment in which they occur.

Semantics
It focuses on the relation between signifiers, like words, phrases, signs, and symbols, and what they stand for their denotation. Linguistic semantics is the study of meaning that is used for understanding human expression through language.

Syntactics 
This is the branch of semiotics dealing with the formal properties of languages and systems of symbols.

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Study Task 01
Wayfinding Research

For the first study task of the new brief, we had to visit a selection of places such as museums and shopping centres to find examples of wayfinding, signage and pictograms in use in selected environments and how they function. 

Size?

The signage found in Size is a good example of it reaching out to its target audience, when you first walk in the store the bright neon lights instantly catch your attention, this enhances the experience but immediately informs you of the navigation of the space. Brand logos are seen on certain floors to inform the public of where the products are, this is an efficient way of wayfinding but may cause problems with an older audience who may be unaware of these brand logos.

The Henry Moore Institute

The wayfinding throughout the Henry Moore Institute is very consistent and clean. It sticks to a basic colour palette which is key to the design because it doesn't pinpoint any particular audience and serves its purpose. The way finding is most helpful as it enabled me to navigate around the gallery with ease, this is mainly down to it being the only type in the gallery, when I visited other galleries the walls were often crowded with text which made it difficult to lay the course of the building.

Leeds Art Gallery

The scale and design of the arrows in these signs are the most important aspect of the wayfinding, Leeds Art Gallery use a simple wayfinding system that guides easily. The use of a clean sans serif typeface adds to the simplicity, the actual size of the type is questionable but the size of the arrows are able to direct the user.  

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Study Task 06

What is a book ?

The definition of what a book is today is rather broad, frankly a book is a set of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of ink, paper, parchment or other materials. A book can communicate many forms of documentation including information such as a story, rules and instructions. Books can simply reflect what we do and whats happening around us, they also point us in the direction the author / designer is trying point us in ( purpose / meaning), for example keeping your attention and visually keeping you drawn to the book.

London-based studio Zak Group designed this book to exhibit the work of artist Tony Oursler, the book documents over 1000 objects that show a visual history of social, spiritual and intellectual belief systems. The design reflects this, with its use of typefaces based on both 18th Century types, as well as materials used in the book’s slipcase and a screen-print on the cover. The book is well made, and reflects its content intelligently. 

This minimal and subtle publication design is given a nice touch by the stock used and the binding technique. The stock is a mix of a peach and brown colours that offset each other perfectly, the binding is tape bind, this bind type is sits ideally with the minimal concept.

The layout and typography are the two big design elements that I love about this two page spread, firstly the use of handwritten type gives this a page a calm approach and adds a diary / scrapbook feel. The exposed content and use of white space effectively draws the eye to the image covering two pages, by doing this it gives off a bold feel to a page occupied by few elements. 

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Study Task 05
Balance & Canons

Notes made in lecture

Balance
Visual balance comes from arranging elements on page so that not one section is heaver than the other, or in other instances the designer can intentionally arrange elements to create tension or a mood.

Proximity 
Proximity or closeness creates a bond between elements on a page, how close together or far apart elements are placed suggests a relationship between what are otherwise seperate parts. 

Alignment
Alignment brings order to chaos. How you align type and graphics on a page and in relation to each other can make your layout easier or more difficult to read.

Repetition / Consistency
Repeating design elements and consistent use of type and graphic styles within a document shows a reader where to go and helps them navigate your design and layouts effectively.

Canons
Canons are principles of page layout design used to measure and describe proportions, margins and print areas. Popular canons to use include the Van de Graaf, Tschichold's Golden Canon and Tschichold's Octavo.

Tschichold Golden Canon



Van De Graaf

Tschichold Octavo

As a part of the study task we had to discuss in groups what we believed the rules of graphic design were. We put together these rules:

Kerning
Readability / Legibility 
Alignment
Layout
Colour Palette

The main basis behind Graphic Design is to communicate through text and image, we should work within rules to achieve this, then again these rules can be broken to communicate to a particular audience or create a new message.

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Study Task 04

Figure & Ground

Notes made in lecture

Figure

The eye differentiates an object from its surrounding area. A form, silhouette, or shape is naturally perceived as figure (object), while the surrounding area is perceived as ground (background). 

Ground

Everything that is not Figure is Ground. As the eye shifts from figure to figure the ground also shifts so that an object can go from figure to ground and back. Usually It is usually the smaller of the elements in the visual field.

White Space

Canvas / page space left between different elements of your design. Active white space is often asymmetrical, which makes the design look more dynamic and active and passive white space is the white space that occurs naturally, such as the area between words on a line or the space surrounding a logo or graphic element. 

For the study task I decided to bring in The Recorder issue one, this issue explorers typography and graphic design, exploring type's role in a wider cultural context through 100 pages.

This double page spread focuses a lot on figure as 8 images dominate the pages then again the title could be considered the figure as it perceives the ground around it well. It has plenty of white space, due to the images being compact.

The page on the left is heavily influenced by the figure of the text and the white space spaces makes this effective. The image is the smaller element in the visual field yet is still effective because of the white space above and below.

The figure is the text as the eye is drawn to this straight away on these two pages. These two pages do have very domineering figures, with the image on the left hand side also catching the eye. These pages may seem overcrowded the white space subtly settles this spread.

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Evaluation

To conclude I feel that my final resolution is successful in terms of achieving my aims and also referring back to what the brief was asking. My typeface is bespoke and achieved the style I was aiming for and effectively communicated light in an efficient and modern way. The feedback critiques have helped me realise that my design has hit its aims and objectives with people commenting on key aspects of the design. I'm very pleased about the positive and negative feedback I received during the last critique because I always find it helpful and motivational to receive feedback on my own work, the feedback pointed out key aspects that maybe If I asked for feedback earlier on in the brief I could of improved on earlier. Even though a few people mentioned the design behind the 's' and 'z', I wish I truly justified the reasoning behind these characters during the crit, but this is a lesson to be learnt in future briefs.

Overall I've really enjoyed this brief, before I started the brief I'd never designed a typeface before or even knew any knowledge of typography, so one of my personal aims was to finish the brief with a new understanding of typography, the history. the pioneers and the terminology. Now that this brief is finished I can confidently say I've learnt key rules and definitions of typography, I can confidently talk about the anatomy of type thanks to this brief. Ive learnt ways in which I can improve in future briefs, for example not rushing into design decisions and ideas, by doing this it enables me to think more about the briefs and my ideas. Finally when I started the brief I set personal aims of designing a typeface that had a strong theme and related to my given adjective. I believe I've reached this aim, the theme was to have an efficient, modern and consistent typeface that communicates light and judging from the feedback I received I achieved that, so I'm happy i was able to reach that aim.

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 Feedback

In the final critique we presented our final typeface and manifesto to the class, we had to ask three questions to evaluate upon our work, the questions were as follows:

Is my manifesto relevant to to the design of my manifesto?
'I read the manifesto before I read that the manifesto derives from 'light' and automatically recognised the thin, sharp and consistent width of lines which are documented well in the manifesto'
'yes, its absolutely relevant, the thickness of the letterforms are very appropriate'
'yes, very effective and clear'
'manifesto justifies characteristics very well'

I received positive feedback about my final manifesto and how it related to the design of the typeface, the consistent stroke width seemed to be the main attribute to communicating light, it made the typeface clear and members of the class realised this,which is positive to hear.

Other than light, what else does my typeface communicate?
'modern, effeicent, spacious and technology'
'digital / futuristic'
'bowls look similar to leaves'
'digital (retro old computer digits)'
'the geometric forms connate modernism, efficiency and movement'
'structure'

I was very pleased with this feedback because the leaf design was noticed in feedback and all the other words used to describe my typeface were similar to my aims and manifesto, even listening to new words that my typeface could possibly communicate could later influence my manifesto, for example the one piece of feedback saying 'digital' referring to retro computer graphics, I never associated this with my design before the crit but now it has been mentioned, it does have similarities.

What would you change?
'I personally would change the 'z', due to it being similar to the 's', it should be its own character'
'I would change the 'k' so it looks less like the 'h''
'letters 'z' and 's' are hard to read'
'would be good to see variant uppercase'

All the comments were similar, many people change the 's' and 'z', I can take this on board but I think I should have explained the reasoning behind mirroring the characters better. Comments were made about the readability and legibility of 's' and 'z', maybe if i made the 's' vertically longer it'd be easier for the viewer.

Overall I'm very pleased with the positive and negative feedback I received during the last critique because I always find it helpful and motivational to receive feedback on my own work.

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Studio Brief 02
Final Typeface & Typeface Specimen

This is my final typeface, for the production of this typeface I used a method of using the leaf design template to base a majority of the characters from. For example when designing the 'd' I simply added a ascending stem to create the character, the 'e' was created using using a scissor tool. I used this tool in illustrator to take away the straight stroke on the right hand side of the character then I simply added a stroke to the body to devise an 'e'.This was common method I used throughout the design process of the typeface, this method always refers back to the aim of being efficient. Overall I'm very pleased with the final outcome of the design of my typeface, its stuck to the aims and manifesto of being modern, efficient and convey light. 

For the final resolution of this brief I designed a type specimen. I used the type specimens I received from Fontsmith to influence the layout of the specimen. I wanted my specimen to firstly introduce the typeface, then precede to the manifesto and the character set then lastly show the type used in text. Before I started designing the specimen, I wanted the specimen itself to relate to my given adjective, so I had the idea of printing on tracing paper, this stock is translucent alike the name of the type and ties in with 'light'.

The translucent effect works really well for my specimen, when layered on top of each other each sheet is viewable but the only text you can read is the one present on the current page. I like this effect as it signifies translucence and my idea of 'light'. The opening page of the specimen introduces the name of the typeface and I briefly mentioned the brief for the typeface, that I chose Helvetica and had to communicate light. The second page jumps straight into the character set and the manifesto is made known. In the last page I experimented with the letters to see what the typeface would look like in a block of text. 

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Study Task 02

Above is an alteration I made to the 'h', it isn't a major change but I think it makes a big difference. I found the original 'h' didn't have any relevance to any characters in the set and looked out of place. To change this I altered the body connecting to the stem, this made a considerable difference as the 'h' now is similar to characters such as 'm' and 'n'. This change also refers back to the manifesto with the contrast of curved and straight lines, the original just seemed to singular and curved.

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Studio Brief 02

At this stage I've digitalised my ideas for Lucent, and started developing them in Illustrator.

The base of the design is a leaf influenced design for example found on the a, b, p and the o. The leaf symbolises light referring to a weightless adjective. The design decision to have a leaf shaped body that would act as a base for a majority of the characters, this helps maintain a consistent design also, as well as giving the typeface a distinctive style. The design of the leaf is a contrast of thin curved and straight lines that symbolise a leaf in a modern way.

The leaf design plays a prominent role in the design of some characters, even in some design that the leaf isn't included the curves and lines are similar, this was a key part of the design because I didn't want the leaf inspired characters dominating the character set so I used some of the curves on characters such as 'k', 'r' and the 's'. Subtle changes to the leaf resulted in the design of certain characters. The 'p' and 'q' are simply mirrored then the 'q' has a simple terminal to differentiate the two.

When I first designed the 'r' it seemed rather lost within the set due to its short shoulder, so I extended the shoulder and made the horizontal line longer to make the character larger. I wanted minimal strokes / lines throughout the design, these are evident in the design of 'j' and 'l'. These are very simple characters but are justified in my manifesto, 'clear', 'modern' and 'efficient'.

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Studio Brief 02

After the interim crit I developed the idea for my typeface, first fixing the x-height on the 'a' as it breached the x-height line, which it shouldn't.

Above is the development, I simply removed the ascending line that went over the x-height, then added a bracket at descender line. Now I've made this change the overall design of the 'a' has improved in my opinion. I'm glad I received this feedback in the crit because otherwise I possibly wouldn't have noticed the mistake I made. The older design now looks out of place with the character set I've developed, the angular lines are out of place with the contrasting curves I've now used in the design.

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Typeface Manifesto updated

Following on from the latest interim crit, I decided to update my manifesto to suit the current design and based upon the feedback I received.

Designed to disseminate a modern effervescent style, Lucent has strong characteristics like straight edge shoulders that allow it to have an efficient style. A consistent stroke width gives it a clear approach to any reader of the type. Lucent is best applied as display text as it's modernist look draws an audience in.

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Interim Crit

For this crit we had to present our initial ideas,type manifesto and reasoning behind choosing the specific typeface to base the designs from.

Above is my initial ideas for the typeface, the feedback I received on the design is that it resembles a modernist style that I'm trying to achieve but also the 'A' breaches the x-height, I would need a big design justification to explain this design so I may have to change this aspect in the design, I'm glad I received this feedback as otherwise I wouldn't have noticed this and made a big typography design error. Other members of the class believed this type would work best as a display typeface, I agree as its maybe too thin to read within a block text.

I received positive feedback about my manifesto and typeface name which was encouraging but having the crit enabled me to add new information such as the typeface is applied best as a display typeface.

Typeface Manifesto
Studio Brief 02

Typeface name : Lucent

Designed to disseminate a modern effervescent style, Lucent has strong characteristics like straight edge shoulders that allow it to have an efficient style. A consistent stroke width gives it a clear approach to any reader of the type.

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Study Task 03
Grids

This morning we had an overview about grids used within editorial design and basic terminology used such as multicolumn, modular and baseline grids. We had a task of locating the grids in a newspaper layout and tracing them, I marked up the identity of the grid then evaluated the effectiveness and purpose of this in that medium.

This layout lets the information flow, the narrow columns give this design a simplistic style that is more enjoyable to read. All the text is in the centre of the spread, this gives the piece a more vocal point. This grid is effective because its in-complex and lets the columns flow down the page.

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Setting type lecture & Menu redesign study task

Grids
Common grid sizes are 2x4, 3x6, 4x8, 5x4, 6x6. The more grids you use, the more flexibility you'll have with your work. 

Legibility
The quality of text being clear enough to read. Legibility is mainly determined by display faces,x-height, serif and sans serif.

Readability
Readability is about arranging words and groups of words in a way that allows the readers eye to access the content easily and in a way that makes sense. Hierarchy, Contrast, Kerning, Size and Line height, are all used to improve readability.

Alignment
Alignment is used to organize all type . Almost all text uses alignment to organize lines of type, the letters align along their bases and the lines begin along a line. Rag, flush left, centred, justified are the types of alignments.

Orphans

An orphan is a single word found at the end of a column. 

Widow

A widow is a short line, It is considered as poor typography because it leaves too much white space.

Study Task

For this study task we had to redesign a takeaway menu, with our new understanding of setting type we had to make the menu less complicated and simple for the reader. I decided to use a menu from BentoKing which is Chinese takeaway. The current menu has a few design problems, some of the prices aren't aligned, I think the text is too small and compact so its hard for the reader to understand it. So for the redesign I just wanted to quickly and efficiently inform the reader of the options by improving the line height simplifying the layout.