Final

MY BRAIN IS FILLED WITH SO MUCH TYPE!
Plus trying to study for all the other finals I have at the beginning of next week. Stress and more stress. Looking at the type anatomy and the typeface classification is pretty simple after seeing it for so long. It's just the type founders and years that are difficult as shit to remember. Willy Caslon and Johnny Baskerville 1700 - 1800's. Surprisingly, this is helpful to write it out. Freddy Goudy, 19th century. Nick Jensen - late 19th century. Stanley morrison - times new roman. Matt Carter - 90's. Eric Speakerman - late 80's and Herbet Bayer in 1925. That's about all I can remember now off the top of my head. Back to studying.

Coppola

I was drinking a bottle of Coppola chardonnay with my grandfather this past Thursday. Not a big fan of chardonnay, but this was pretty good. Anyways, the point is the type on the bottle. It was very intriguing. In the foreground you had large modern type style lettering falling into one another. It reminded my of the what we've seen in some of our type studies where all the letters are jumbled together to make a shape more than to be legible. In the background on the Z and Y axis were legible words. I asked my grandpa what drew him to this Coppola bottle over the others and he said the block of letters stood out to him as a shape amongst the others. This was the same thought I had. There was a def. hierarchy though with this layout. It gave me some ideas for project 2. Too bad we're already done with it. I might try some of this with project 3. We'll see.

Sierra Nevada

I was in a bar last night and they had a Sierra Nevada rep there promoting their winter collection. I was noticing the typeface they had chosen for each of their beer types. The one that really stood out to me was their Narwhal Imperial Stout. My favorite types of beers are dark and this was a dark but I didn't know that immediately. Yet I was drawn to the typeface. The serifs on the typeface were very sharp and medieval looking. It was like a new type of Gothic typeface. Very large and white against a black backdrop. The same went for the smaller typeface underneath that read "Imperial Stout" in a dark gold. It definitely fit the product.
I know we watched the Helvetica film yesterday about how it works for so many different products. But there's definitely something about picking a specific font to really sell a product. Especially when it's one like Gothic that stands out in a sea of Helvetica.

Guest Speaker

Blog has been glitchy lately. It wouldn't let me post Friday or Saturday.

Anyways, I really enjoyed our guest speaker on Friday. It was insightful to hear about the different ways advertising is used in the local neighborhoods. I was thinking about the family she mentioned that has their three children going to graphic design school during the week and then works with their parents painting ad signs on the weekend. I wonder if since the old way was a kind of apprenticeship from the older generation to the younger generation, then perhaps now with the younger generation getting an education in design they can provide the older generation with new ideas. Kind of an expansion of design ideas that they wouldn't have to find through just magazine and TV ads.

Project 2

Finally finished up project 2 today. It was tough figuring out which different layouts I was gonna use for each one. I have about 36 different layouts on the computer. From there I narrowed it down to my top 20. Which was around 5 for each layout. I printed those out and cut them all today. It took the entire class period just to narrow it down to a couple for each layout. I tried putting each layout against those in the same category then picking some out and trying to see how it would look as a complete presentation. I also did a few changes to some of the layouts to things that I didn't like initially or issues that I foresaw. Once I got home I looked at them again and it was much easier to pick a layout for layouts 1 and 2. The final two layouts I had narrowed down to 3. I must have ordered and paired them 9 different ways. Once I picked the final 2 then it came down to ordering it. Since I used Baskerville and the rules for layouts 3 and 4 were essentially the same. I've got an idea of in what order it should go now. But I think it may change when I look at it again on Monday morning. Hopefully not because looking at it now I feel like this is it. It conveys the importance I put on the different parts of the text.

Project 1 Continued

With the project 1 presentations wrapping up yesterday, I finally got to answer my question about the different influences of type over the time. It seems like it wasn't a consistent religious and governmental influence like I had thought. After day 1, with Patrick and Blair's time period on day 2 there was a big shift in revolution and freedom. This created a rift between the classes and type they used. This thought continued on through the different eras into the early to mid 20th century and on into the present with type being developed by people different from the wealthy elitists. With education being more readily available, type was able to be developed by many different types of people. The theme seemed to shift to type being developed to stand out from everyone else. With so many different types around today, there is something for everyone hoping to be different. However, type is more based on ease of readability. I can only hope that we don't lose the older artistic types. They take more time and effort to use but their beauty is irreplaceable.

Apparently this didn't post last week like it was supposed to. Weird blogger glitch. 

Parade

Saw a couple signs at the Giants parade. One was kind of a parody sign. It reminded me of those signs that you used to see outside of shows. Like it would be that bands poster advertising the show that night and in black san-serif letters over a white rectangular sticker it would have "sold out" on it. There was the same kind of thing at the parade. It was on several of the street banner posters that are around the city. There's different Giants players and it says, "playoffs, we're in" on it. Well on Wednesday there was a sticker over it in the same style that said, "we won". I thought it was a hella sweet idea to do that. Another sign was in the office windows above where we were standing there was a different letter in each window, spelling out "The Giants". I couldn't figure out the type font. There were serifs but the serifs were kind of weird. It was a typical serif on the T's and E's but what was weird were the way the 'H' and 'A' had octagons on the end where the typical serifs should have been. I have a picture that I'm gonna try and upload later, along with the others I still have.