OUGD603 - Typeface design - Type in Grainger Town & Typography inspiration

Grainger Town has an array of amazing architecture so you don't tend to notice typography in the area, unless its a street level with commercial shops occupying the bottom floor of many of the buildings. I wanted to focus on typography which is a part of the buildings, that is often hand carved into the stone, to see which styles were prominent in the 19th Century. Additionally as a part of research I looked at typography that is inspired by architecture, to get a grasp of how it can be done.

The type that features on many buildings is a mix of both slab serifs and elaborate serif that are rather similar to the Corinthian orders. One piece that stood out for me was the image to the left, I'm unsure when the type was carved into the stone but the typeface looks contemporary. The 'G' letterform especially has strong characteristics which gives it a distinct look.

One common factor which has occurred numerous times in research into designing type, is people recommending to study other types. Looking at them in a critical way, from a contextual or historical perspective, will help me understand why certain design choices are used.

The first type I studied was Function by Anthony Burrill x The Designers Foundry. The type is a grid based geometric typeface, which is in regular, condensed, stencil and extended width forms. It's a caps only display constructivist influenced  type and was designed as a response to various collected examples of utilitarian and grid based type.

It's rigid and bold with thick strokes giving mainly the apex's of the type the limelight. What I normally like about grid based geometric typefaces is the negative space created from the rigid letterforms. Function also creates interesting shapes from negative space as seen with the C letterform, which I think looks like Grecian column and base rotated 90 degrees.

The second influence was a more recent project from Craig Ward who has designed the new England shirt typeface for the upcoming world cup. Craig has crafted St Georges cross into dynamic letterforms which are distinctively English.

I can take inspiration from this as the typeface is made from graphical elements from the cross, so I analysed how the shape has been used. This made me consider ways in which I can transform the graphical elements of Grainger Town into a typeface. Craig also took influence from other typefaces such as examining the clarity and geometry of classic English typefaces such as Johnston and Gill Sans.