51–261: Communication Design Fundamentals
Assigned Typeface: Garamond.
Part 1: Research
(i) Who Designed It?
Claude Garamond is for the most part accredited for the creation of the font back in the 16th century, and the typeface is name after him. The Garamond italics, however, are the works of Robert Granjon, who is also a French type designer in the 16th century.
(ii) What type classification does it fall under?
Old-style, serif font.
(iii) How popular is Garamond?
Garamond-style typefaces started to regain popularity during the 18th and 19th century and widely populary today, often used for book printing and body text.
(iv) Special features of Garamond:
readability
Clear stroke contrast and capital letters on the model of Roman square capitals, which makes it easy to read.
contrast
The x-height, the height of lower-case letters, is low, which makes the capital letters larger than most typefaces in relation to its lower case.
distinctive characteristics
In Garamond’s letterforms, the ‘e’ has a small eye and the bowl of the ‘a’ has a sharp turn at top left.
Part 2: Curating Content
i) Design 1
At first, I don't really have any ideas in my head yet about how to use typography methods to design this poster, so my first iteration / sketch was just a mind-freeballing on what I thought the poster might look like. I was thinking of mimicking a paper / paragraph where you have kind of a title, a BIG letter to start the paragraph and other things smaller just because Garamond is so widely used in book printing and body text. However, after Hannah gave me some advice on the restructuring the piece, I deleted some unnecessary features and made the poster look cleaner and easier for the reader to grasp information (see below iteration 2).
However, with this iteration done, I realized that my design was too simple and didn't capture the vibes of Garamond too well, so I ended up changing up my design altogether and recreate another.
ii) Design 2
For this new design, I decided to use a visual metaphor (but not literal) to capture the timelessness of Garamond and how it is one of the oldest fonts out there that still have great popularity today.
That’s when I thought of a clock, and using the letters from Garamond as pointers, namely “g” and “d” because they are ascenders with long tails. I experimented with both and went with “g” in the end as I feel like it could represent Garamond better since it is the letter Garamond starts with, also it’s more aesthetically pleasing lol. Also, I used the letter O as the backdrop of the clock because it has the roundest shape out of all the letters.
At this point, I was thinking about adding the essential information for the poster but without making the design too crowded and dirty since the clock itself needs to be seen as the centerpiece of the poster.
I thought about adding a few time marks for the clock, and each time mark could therefore corresponds to one section of the information.
However, that ended up not working well because the two margins on the sides are two slim. What I ended up doing was keeping the two time marks on the top and bottom, and place information alongside the two time marks while stretching the word “garamond” with the longer pointer “g”.
I edited the poster a bit more after our class last Thursday and took the advice of deleting some of my textual information and really make my clock the focal point of my poster.
After the deletion, I felt like the gray backdrop of the clock is really lacking something and decided to add a color. The color I ended up choosing is a shade of vintage blue because I really felt like that shade of blue is timeless, which matches with the vibe of garamond.
After that, I decided to add back some information, but since too much info might interfere with the design, I decided to go with a fun joke on Garamond and typefaces in general and leave it at that.
reference:
The joke is inspired by the following post, where it imagines how Claude Garamond would say in an interview if he’s alive, and David Carson is a famous typeface designer whose work seeks to interrupt with the traditional typeface space, the space Garamond represents.
https://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/001714.html