Class 5 Reflection | A3. Typographic Hierarchy
It’s interesting that an article (Herbert Bayer “On Typography”) about typography can be written in all lower case and still the author says things like, “the history of our alphabet and any probing into its optical effectiveness expose a lack of principle and structure, precision and efficiency that should be evidenced in this important tool” and considers abandoning capital letters as courageous. I don’t find this courageous. I find it juvenile. And honestly, the article was very hard to read and understand since it was missing the basic mechanisms of what makes a series of words into sentences, and sentences into a paragraph. It reminded me of reading Jack Kerouac’s single-scroll version of “On The Road.” Without the proper line breaks and chapters which are a clear indication of when to pause and when to stop, the book was exhausting, and yet is still one of my all-time favorites.
However, this article was also exhausting, but I don’t think I am ready to label it a favorite. Reading is exhausting. And he’s right, our eyes never rest. But this article brought a whole new level of exhaustion. A heaviness that begins in the back of my head, deep in my eye sockets.
Furthermore, I agree with Bayer. We must not make cliches of old formulas. Let’s use capital letters to begin a sentence.
I found the information in Dabner et al “Graphic Design School” very useful for our latest assignment, A3. Typographic Hierarchy and found it very interesting how the author/s said that “it is advisable to avoid the default setting of 12pt where you can because it is industry default and suggests you have not made a design to change it.” However, what if a designer did test the 14pt and 16pt and then ultimately kept the 12pt default?
I also appreciated the information about letterspacing. It helped me to make design decisions for our assignment in regards to the font sizes so that the title stayed on the same line in Task 5, for example. It was also important to make sure there was visual evenness in each of the tasks based on the instructions.
I wonder how graphic design will change moving forward now that we, and we should as designers, design with accessibility in mind. Justified text, for example, is inaccessible and causes distracting “rivers of white”, which is difficult for those with dyslexia. I feel like this is very important to mention in graphic design documents.
I really enjoyed our latest assignment! I appreciated how differently our decisions changed between each task. For example, in task 2 we were only allowed to horizontal shift to organize the information. But, task 6 allowed us to use both leading and horizontal shifts. With the addition of leading, we were able to organize the information the same, but differently. So even though I indented the word “Presentations” in task 2, I didn’t indent the same word in task 6 since leading allowed for a little bit more flexibility.
The way I chose to organize the information was based on what topics belonged together and should be grouped by either weight, color, etc. The title of the document was also going to have the biggest font size, a different color, and weight. The date was another piece of important information but not a title, so it would have a slightly smaller size but still be emphasized by its weight or color. The presentation times and titles were grouped together, but I thought it was important to call out the times since I believe viewers might pick which presentation they want to attend based on the time, and not so much on the topic. While I believe the topics are important, time is essential to one's schedule. I appreciated the freedom we had in task 10, especially to use italics, which I always felt emphasized but were a supplement to information.
