Typography

Introduction to typography

Typography is the art of positioning letters and text so that the reader can easily read, and understand the material presented. It involves the font, style, and structure, with the goal of evoking particular feelings and communicating particular messages.

Typography is an essential part of user interface design and involves much more than just selecting fancy fonts. Strong visual hierarchy, graphic balance, and the overall tone of the product can all be achieved with good typography. Typography should offer a great user experience, enhance readability and accessibility, and guide and enlighten the users.

How companies use typography

Companies use typography to represent their brand and the purpose behind it. For example, a sports brand would most likely use simple and sleek lettering while a wine company may use more calligraphic and fancy font styles.

When advertising, the company would often follow the theme of the brand to represent what the company is advertising. Below, I have placed some example advertisements from my client: Nike.

In this example, Nike uses blocky lettering alongside monochrome colouring to portray their message. The font is extremely bold and represents the message of the advert: "Fast + Fearless".

This example is quite simple compared to the first one. However, the letters have been designed to portray the sport basketball.

This example consists of multiple pieces that follow a consistent colour scheme: green, white and dark grey. This shows the capabilities of colour schemes in typography. This collection just promotes the brand and its message.

USING TYPOGRAPHY BOOKS TO INFLUENCE MY DESIGN

In this book, Steven Heller and Mirko Ilić present the reader with a large variety of different text styles, techniques and influences. At the beginning of the book, they highlight the purpose and effect of typography; from colours to different themes and how they present the brain with different ideas. The book consists of many typography campaigns and art pieces. Some simple and some complex. It features many different artists. Below, I have chosen a couple of pieces that will inspire my piece:

For my primary inspiration, I chose this piece (right) because of the "breakthrough" effect of the text. I thought this was quite interesting and different compared to the other artists and pieces in the book.

However, this design is a little boring in my opinion. It uses a lot of free space. So I plan to add something extra to it.

As a secondary inspiration, I chose this piece on the left. I want to use some foreign characters in piece. I also like the blurred brush effect. I plan to attempt something similar to this in my piece. Instead of a plain background, I may use this effect as a background for my piece.

My Design

INVERTED VARIANTS

PROCESS

Placing The Text:

I wanted to use one of my client's slogans for this piece. So I chose 'zero gravity'. I used the Nike font (Futura Bold) and placed it accordingly (1). For the 'breakthrough' text effect, I decided to use Japanese characters which translated to 'Zero Gravity' (2). I then aligned all the text and used the 'rectangular marquee' tool (a tool that selects part of a layer which you can then copy or erase) to select my English text and erase it so the Japanese text would stand out and recreate the effect in my primary inspiration.

ADDING BLUR:

I decided to add some blur to the main text. I used a specific blur effect called 'Iris Blur'. This is an effect that adds a sort of 'radial' blur to the layer. So this only affects a certain part of the layer. Below, I have added the settings I used and a diagram is shown to explain the effect of Iris Blur.

MAKING THE BACKGROUND:

For this piece, I wanted to try something abstract. I wanted to create a sort of texture which was similar to my second inspiration. I did this by creating another text layer with just 'Zero Gravity'. I then made it bigger so it took up the whole canvas.

I now wanted to manipulate the effect of my second inspiration. For this, I had to use the 'Motion Blur' effect. This essentially blurs your layer at a certain angle so it would look like it's in motion. I blurred this layer at 90 degrees so it would look like the layer was going upwards.

ADDING COLOUR AND EFFECTS:

To add colour to this piece, I simply used the 'colour overlay' effect on the background. I chose a darker pink and adjusted the opacity of the effect so it wouldn't be too harsh.

For the effects on the main text, I used 'Outer Glow', an effect that adds a soft glow effect; I also used an effect called 'Inner Shadow', an effect that mimics a drop shadow effect but inside the layer. I made this into an 'inner glow' effect and coloured it purple.

Below are the effects used on all main text:

FINAL TOUCHES:

As final touches, I added some subtle text layers to make this an advertisement. I added the Nike text logo and a mockup date for when this collection would release. I also added another text layer stating: 'Footwear Collection'.

I then added all the effects above and gaussian blur (a simple blur effect) to the additional text to blend it a bit better. Finally, I added a black layer and applied some grain/noise and applied it to the top of the piece to add a vintage effect.

NOTES

Overall, I am happy with how this piece turned out. This whole piece was made out of text layers. However, If approached this task again, I would heavily focus on the commercial design aspect of the piece. I feel that I could've added some more advertisement-related layers to this piece.

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