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.

Project 1

Finally got my presentation for project 1 done. Whew! Between my project and the one that followed I've noticed the history of type is a very interesting in relation to the influences of the times and the evolution of type in general. Especially pertaining to the influences of different eras and what not. Just from our presentation alone, the religious aspect was very influential. I'm interested to see where that leads to when we get to the modern presentation and see if there is still religious influence when it comes to type. I'll presume at this point that there will be since there still is religious influence in other aspects of the world outside of religion.

Handwriting

There's no real way to put handwriting into a typeface. I guess that's why handwriting is unique. Even though we all learn the same way to print letters with those two lines and the little dash along the middle to differ upper and lower case letters. Just this past week I was helping my step-niece print her letters that way. However, when I was at work this weekend I had four different people writing ticket orders and all of their handwriting was different. Some added extra loops to their letters, others were very straight forward. One was such chicken scratch that it looked like they were writing during an earthquake. I guess what I'm saying it that it's weird how we all learn the same but turn out writing differently.