Month: September 2018

First few seconds in and there is already comic sans slander I can’t take it anymore–

COMIC SANS

IS

THE BEST FONT

IN

THE WORLD!

we stan an overused and irregular legend! even though it is ugly i still love the typeface ironically

okay i’ve gotten my point across now on to the review:

I think I’m pretty good at identifying Futura now, after having done so much research on it for my presentation. I identify it through the capital A, lowercase j, and the very round ‘a’ ‘b’ ‘d’ ‘g’ ‘o’ ‘p’ and ‘q’s. You know, after my presentation on Futura, I can never unsee it.

“Oh hey that’s Futura.”

“What’s that font? Futura? Lovely!”

“You know what would be a good font for these slides? Futura.”

Even though it is another legendary overused font, Futura has a more distinguished baggage of being a typeface icon of the 20th century, which is why people don’t hate it as much as comic sans.

For a beginner like me, i’m starting to distinguish typefaces using it’s broad categories, like Serif and Sans Serif, and it’s sub-categories like Black Letter, Geometric, Humanist, etc.

For specific names of typefaces, I still have difficulties, especially for those  that look similar to each other, like Didot and Bodoni.  However, I think through this exercise it really helps in training my eyes to be more sensitive in distinguishing typefaces.

Wow! After watching this TED talk, it fund it super relevant not only to typography, but to almost all aspects of life. The main message of not compromising is very philosophical and really helps to turn perspectives around. For me, one of the examples that stood out is when the speaker starts to talk about the period on technological infancy in the mid 80s. The issue now was about the size of the fonts, and the way it was being designed using vector technology. For serif fonts, a lot of vector points were being used to create the elegant fonts, which resulted in the sans serif being more economical.

However, the speaker goes on to say that when he designed a serif without the curve, instead using polygonal, it became a design solution for a non-existing problem because the engineers had already solved that issue the week before using code, which meant that now they could have as my different types of font on the computer with no problem. While this meant that the speaker’s solution of the polygonal serif font might seem not needed anymore, he still did not throw it away, because later in the future when Microsoft contacted him, there was a new series of problems where they needed a core set of fonts to fact up to the problems of reading and writing, which was the coarse resolution display.

I could go on to talk about his story, but to me the main ideology behind this is that he never gave up, never compromised. Does creating a design solution to an issue that was already solved mean that his work was for no use? Does the limitations of technology/medium that he created at the time a compromise or simply just working around the constraints? I feel that working in constraints shouldn’t stop us as designers, rather challenge us to create more things out of the box.

To me, I’ve always believed in the age old saying that “a good craftsman never blames his tools”, which encourages me to find creative solutions to problems that were never that big in the first place, if you thought about it in a different angle, or maybe change your priorities when tackling a project. One of my favourite lines from this video is:

“Satisfaction in doing something that cannot be perfect, but still can be done to the best of your ability.”

It brings me back to a time when both my O-Level Arts and Malay Language teacher told me the same type of advice because i was more concerned about grades rather than learning, and was so afraid to fail. I was stressing out because i was also really bad at the subjects. I think that now, i have a new perception towards failing; Though it might not look pretty in my graduation script, I don’t think that it should matter now that i’m studying something creative. Instead, i should focus on my qualitative contribution as nothing is ever perfect and there is always room from improvement, and as long as you know that you’ve done the best that you could, that’s good enough.

I could write Haikus all day if you wanted me to; i’m so good at it. The Haiku above is:

Typography Class

My brain is not working now

ERROR 404

This haiku captures the fact that i had a morning class, and i hadn’t had coffee yet, and only managed to get a cup when typography class in the afternoon started. For the poster, i was inspired by this Bohemian Rhapsody code below:

I felt that the non-linear way of writing the song lyrics was genius because i could still get it even though the actual song lyrics were not used, and the sentence structure was all jumbled up. To make this i went onto the OSS Typography class website, right clicked, and pressed on “view page source”:

It gave me a wall of code to play with. I wanted to go a little bit technological with my design because of the ERROR 404 at the end. The code that i wrote in the poster makes no sense, i actually wish i could make sense.

For this short artwork i was inspired my insatiable need to keep everything in order and in check all the time. i use the word insatiable because i ALWAYS. NEED. ORDER. Well, i try to, anyway. I also put them in grids because that’s how I organise things as well; be it in a daily planner or my numerous cabinets to keep specific categories of things.  This is why i chose black, because its is a very basic tone and shows a no nonsense kind of attitude. This is how i choose to dress myself too; All my clothes are a monotonous black and white tone. Order is what I want to be.

As for the chaos part, I tapped into the part of my head where i was more diva-like, all fun fun fun! and a little loony. I chose the brightest pink I could find because it really speaks volumes about how much of a bimbo diva crazy woman that i actually am (in the inside)! Also because it contrasts with the black i used for the order part.

Also, did you notice a fine grey outline of the word CHAOS in the bottom half of the white boxes? It was a way for me to show how the word CHAOS had a life and personality on it’s own, not wanting to be boxed in. That’s why the letter C went to the last line; it wanted to be with it’s other crazy friends instead of being all alone together with the borings. I didn’t want to make the grey lines too thick or else it would have been too convoluted. I used only one typeface for this: Helvetica. This is because i wanted to show the duality of an individual person, made possible just by how they chose to dress themselves (like meeeeeeeeeeeee)

From the feedback, I understand how it would have been better if the word ORDER was not part of the grid, instead stood by itself inside the box I created. It also would have been clearer if i made the grid lines thinner than what it is.