I came across this article in ‘magculture, Leslie, 2003’.
It’s an illustrated magazine article from Dazed & Confused magazine (UK, Issue 89, May 2002) where Gwen Stefani conducted a telephone interview with Terry Hall who was the lead singer in a few 2-tone Sca bands in the 80’s.
The Illustrations are made by Lizzie Finn where the photographs were printed onto fabric and then embroidered with coloured thread.
I’m not sure if this style of illustration was used because it was becoming cool at this point of time (http://embroidery.embroiderersguild.com/2003-6/rudgley.htm) or because 2-tone music fuses elements of Jamaican music such as ska, reggae and rocksteady with newer electronic rock styles such as punk rock and new wave, this would account for using an older organic style of craft in a digital format. I feel it works and is unique but makes me laugh because you have the man looking tough with the woman looking cool and then needlework all over the page, there’s not a lot of logic in that but I’m sure it was cool at the time.
In order to understand typography you need to know that there are more categories than just sans-serif and serif to be aware of, there’s a long history of creating typefaces in Europe and we’re lucky enough to have a type classification system that helps to identify the intricate details that make up these different letterforms.
Ranging from Humanist in the 1460s to the advertisers typeface of choice during the Industrial Revolution; Slab Serif in the early 1800s. I found a really useful site that gives a brief overview of the subject:
http://ilovetypography.com/2007/11/06/type-terminology-humanist-2/
As these categories were devised in the nineteenth century obviously they were meant for serif fonts but they also can be applied to sans-serif fonts too. There are examples of this on page 46 of the book ‘Thinking with Type’ which defines Helvetica as a transitional sans-serif which might explain it’s popularity as it’s neither too geometric or too humanist.
Personally I like the humanist style of typography because it has more emotion and character although as always a balance is essential and I feel the font that I chose for my spread has a good humanist feel to it whilst still being of a modern clean styling, serifs can aid readability and FF Meta designed by Eric Spiekermann whilst being a sans-serif has little additions to it that both aid readability and offer humanistic qualities, for me this is a good all round versatile typeface family.
I also learned whilst reading the book ‘Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works’ that when we read our brain recognises words before we’ve needed to consciously read them so I feel that if small type is incorrectly set using either too tight or too loose letterspacing, using typefaces with busy serifs or adversely san-serif typefaces that are overly geometric then it makes it harder to recognise the individual letter shapes and therefore the words as a whole, thereby slowing reading, and IF LETTERS ARE SET IN CAPITALS THEN THE BRAIN HAS TO READ EACH INDIVIDUAL LETTER AS THE UNIQUE SHAPE OF EACH LETTER IS HARD TO DETERMINE BY THE UNCONSCIOUS PART OF THE BRAIN.
I’m glad to know that there are reasons why we choose certain typefaces for different situations and that there are categories that help us to identify a typefaces characteristics so in the future instead of choosing a typeface based on how I feel it looks I can use a bit of knowledge to help me decide whether it’s right for the job that I need it for.
I like this video from Think Visually Studios whereby they have the idea of substituting a boring power point presentation that would struggle to get people interested and attentive, instead using a well illustrated image and storyboarding it into an animated video that is interesting and humorous.
Erik Spiekermann explains how typography is linked to culture and interacts within and affects our daily lives whether we’re aware of it or not. It also explains the design process with regards to typography and how type can be more easily explained by relating it to music rather than grids and more formal aspects that are often associated with the profession.
I wonder how hard this animation is to create, it’s a pretty simplistic design, the interactive element of it makes it appealing; if it was purely an animation to watch it would probably need to be much more intricate to create the wow factor.
This is my final animation I created where we had to animate a statistic or the story behind it, I decided to create my animation to encourage young people to vote, in the end it had a broader appeal as it plays on the fact that people pay for taxes and therefore people should take an interest where their money is going.
I like this animation, it shows how visualising and animating information can catch peoples attentions and make more of an impact than allowing them to read it as a story or hearing it purely as an audio transcript.
I’d love to create something like this and maybe I will one day when I’ve learnt the software better, unfortunately if you haven’t got a great deal of experience with the software it can take much longer to create the effect you want to. Anything’s possible with After Effects, it just takes time and a lot of playing about with the software.
A criticism of this video would be to say that it overruns, two minutes maximum I feel for an animated video such as this, a designer should have the ability to decide what is most important within a communication and also to know when the audience is likely to switch off.
This is a lovely little video animating an inspiring speech about creativity, well worth a watch if you’re starting out in the creative field.
Nice to see some positive things happening and being rewarded in society.
I'm Mark Deane and am currently studying Visual Communication at Arts University College Bournemouth. This is my design blog detailing interesting thoughts, visions and sounds that I come across.
