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Day 5 - July 9th

I think that we were all a little disappointed that today would be our last day with Karen Moyer. Between her deep and broad design knowledge, unstoppable exuberance, and impish grin she has made us all very happy to be studying at CMU.

The day began with a critique of our last two typographical hierarchy exercises: composition and ‘final.’ For the composition exercise we were to take our favorite version of the poster we’ve been working on for the last week and set it into a rectangular field of up to 11″x17″. We had to print on 11″x17″ paper and then go at it with an Exacto knife, which I hadn’t done since 2D Design in high school, but it was fun. I think the main point of this exercise (besides the obvious), was to get us thinking about how we use and perceive negative/white space. I was actually pretty happy with my compositions, but made a stupid mistake, leaving one line in a slightly larger stroke width than I should have (or was allowed within the assignment’s parameters). Karen at first started to talk well of my efforts, but then noticed my error and essentially gave them a “blech.” I think this may prove to be my most important design lesson today: careless errors can quickly get an otherwise fine design solution thrown to the wayside.

For the second exercise of the day, in which we were finally allowed to edit the text we were working on a bit and utilize as many typographic variables as we felt necessary, I had fortunately not made the same mistake. I was happy to see that most of the class had come up with fine solutions to our problem, and all of my classmates have come a very long way in the past week (myself included). I couldn’t help but be even more happy that Karen seemed to consider my solution the best in the class. I’d post the finished product here, but for two issues. First, it really wouldn’t look very special to anyone who doesn’t understand the amount of work and iterative design that went into it; and second because Karen has apparently been using this assignment for many years, and I can’t help but think of it as her proprietary thing.

After critiquing our work, Karen went on to explain how all of the exercises we’ve been using are useful for real projects. Simple as the exercises were, they can be a great way to arrive at typographical design solutions in the future. She also explained how different solutions will generally fall into two different categories: majorly different alternatives and variations (subtler changes within a given alternative). She pointed out that it is always important to try both of these to find the best solution.

I asked Karen how to know when you are done working on a solution. The question was in my mind because last night I was on version 14 of my final piece and not stopping, when I asked one of my classmates for advice on what to do next, to which he responded “You’re done.” Karen responded with “Thank God for deadlines.” She said that you’re never done, that there’s always one more thing you can do or try. You simply need to take the reflective knowledge you gain and apply it to your next project. In this way I think design is a lot like music. When I work on a song I always know I can keep going back and hammering at it some more, but most of the time I’d rather move on. When I go to the next piece however, I always have some new insight I’ve gained from the last.

Karen finished the day with a lecture on typography; more specifically readability and legibility, from which I pulled the following tidbits:

• Never use serif and sans-serif fonts together.
• Auto-tracking is pretty good - you may find that you rarely have to make manual adjustments here.
• Kerning takes a very long time, and is usually only really important with display size fonts and larger (14+ pts).
• Kerning is done where ‘counterform’ appears large. ‘Form’ is the space underneath a letter, and counterform is the space above and around it.
• The idea behind manual kerning is that we want to preserve the regular visual rhythm of letters, and so may need to pull some closer together.
• To decide where to kern, find the optical gray and adjust for maximum evenness.
• Temporarily tracking out text a bit can make it easier to know where to kern.
• When designers use tracking, it is generally done quite purposefully - it is not a normal adjustment.
• Readability refers to how a text appears when skimmed or glanced at. Do the important parts stand out? Does the text look enticing enough to make the reader look deeper?
• Legbility refers to the little issues of deciphering individual bits of text.
• Normal flush-left, rag-right text is generally the most legible.
• Justified text requires longer lines with more characters to avoid ‘rivers.’
• Conversely, if line length is too long, it becomes difficult for readers to keep track of what line they are on.
• Rivers impede legibility.
• Full line spaces (blank lines) are ok in text-sizes, but tend to look too big in display sizes.
• The minimum number of characters/spaces/punctuation required to justify a line is about 40, and 55-70 is optimal.
• If you want to justify but have only 40 or so characters/spaces/punctuation per line, it’s better to move to a smaller font to allow more characters/line (or use a condensed font).
• When you have more than about 70 characters/line, you need to add additional line space to preserve legibility (regardless of justification).
• 2 points of leading is normal for text.
• Normal stroke weights for text are 45 to 55 (in Univers anyway - this depends on the font).
• When putting something together, start with the body copy, and build hierarchy out from there.
• If all else is equal, justified and rag-right are of equal legibility - but justified text is rarely done well, and so rag-right tends to be easier to read.
• Caption text, due to its small size, often requires a little extra leading (even though line lengths tend to be small).
• Title text doesn’t necessarily require a larger type size, as long as there is some signal of its importance.

Whew! Quite a list, eh? For the afternoon we just played around in Photoshop, working on learning it’s ins and outs. I threw together the following rather cool image from a pic of a long-haired long-horned bull:

And this one was from a scan of my sunglasses

:

July 9th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Fundamentals, Photography, Typography | No Comments »  

Day 4 - July 6th

Friday at last! Though it’s been a short week (only four days of class), we spend 6 hours a day in class, and I’d forgotten how exhausting being a student can be! At least I can catch up with my blog!

We had another critique of our updated typographical hierarchy projects this morning. Everyone is improving quickly (though some were great to start) and it’s interesting to see how we all start to come up with more similar solutions as time goes on. I think that this must be a sure sign that we’ve collectively familiarized ourselves with the content and are fully in the development stage of our design process. Class was a bit longer today, and as a result I came away with many more juicy bits of design wisdom:

• Value is placed on efficiency. Handling the whole problem in the fewest moves is most often the best path. - I am trying to relate this to the concept of simplicity, but I’m not sure they’re the same. Rather, I imagine that efficiency is doing as little as necessary, whereas simplicity is appearing to have done as little as possible. I’ll have to think on this more.
• When new variables are added into a design problem, make sure to look for new opportunities/discoveries that were not previously available.
• Try to make discoveries. Once made, attack them with good judgment, so that only the truly worthwhile remain.
• Be careful that heavy stroke-weights don’t push lighter fonts into the background. - This was a problem with my own design, where bold text was causing the viewer to ignore lighter text, which seemed to receded into the negative space.
• Two bold lines stacked on top of each other can be a good way to demarcate the most important single line in a piece.
• An unnatural typographic design can work because it is odd (thus garnering attention), but won’t always. It will, however, always make for a harder problem to solve.
• Too many ‘outs and ins’ obscure the norm (think margins). Think about clarifying the norm so that exceptions become clear.
• Try to imagine text as being hung from the top, rather then built up from the bottom. - I think that this is referring to the need for delicate balance rather than weighty and architectural structure.
• Left dictating right, fits the English/Western mental model. - Because we read from left to right, we expect type on the left to pertain to text on the right (where present).

We also received a short lecture on typographic composition. Karen explained that eye-tracking has shown that people looking at a blank square or rectangle will come to rest there eyes at a point slightly above the center of the shape. We also tend to look to the top-left quadrant of a shape first for text (because this is how we read), so if text is inserted in that quadrant we get overkill and viewers will tend to ignore the right hand quadrants. Finally, we covered the long list of typographic variables:

• Structure - Karen described this as a ‘topological map of type.’ I’m going to have to research this, because I’m afraid I didn’t understand.
• Proportion - the height to width ratio of type.
• Shape - Serifs, etc. The detailed shape of letters.
• Weight - stroke weight (boldness).
• Size - font size.
• Tone/Value - some discussion ensued regarding the meaning of this term. In the end the consensus seemed to be that it refers to gray scale ‘color.’
• Color - Encompassing hue, value, and saturation/intensity and luminosity.
• Texture - just what it sounds like, but how do you describe this?
• Position - the position of text relative to a format/composition.
• Orientation - left to right, upside down, diagonal, etc. Karen also told us that left-to-right oriented letters arranged in a vertical to form a word (as often seen on large store sign in urban areas), is her pet peeve, and we should never do it or we’re going to hell. I must admit that I’m surprised by the religious implications of typography! (mind you this is a running joke in our class)

For the afternoon we worked a bit more on our Pulp Fiction projects, and were treated to a wonderful lecture on the history of modern typography by my classmate Alex. Alex is a great speaker, extremely knowledgeable, and the biggest font-geek I’ve ever met. I love this place!

Here are my latest iterations of the Pulp fiction design. I think things got cheesier, but my more design savvy classmates seemed to prefer these to yesterday’s…

July 6th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Fundamentals, Typography | 2 Comments »  

Day 3 - July 5th

We all enjoyed the holiday, and had a great time watching fireworks go off all over the city from a classmate’s rooftop. Back Thursday morning, we sat down for our first critique. Our assignment had required that we make our assigned piece of text clearer using only one (and later two) typographic variables at a time (e.g., line spacing, font stroke weight, and multiple flush-left margins). We all pinned our three best attempts to the wall and Karen explained which were better and why.

Among the things I learned:

• The degree of contrast present in a text is important to make it engaging. This was particularly relevant to our assignment because we are preparing an 8.5″x11″ text-only poster that might hang in a campus hallway.
• Watch out for ‘masses’ of text when dealing with two stroke-weights. These masses quickly blur into a haze of gray.
• Be wary of the ‘zebra-effect.’ That is, when there is too much quick alteration back-and-forth between strong and light stroke weights (or whatever), it becomes unclear which (light or dark) is the norm, and removes meaning from the entire piece. Making the norm of a piece clear is necessary to elucidate variation - it is important to view a piece as a gestalt

And a few of my own thoughts on what I learned during the critique:

• Looking at printed copies together simultaneously is extremely important to finding the best aspects of each. These best aspects may often need to be combined before the optimal solution is reached.
• Print it out! Trying to imagine what a typographic piece will look like when viewing it on a computer screen alone is simply ineffective.

And finally, a little typographic vocabulary that I probably should have known already:

• Tracking - All the space between letters evenly spread on a line.
• Kerning - the size of a single space between letters.
• Leading - Line height, or the space between lines of text.

For the afternoon we began playing around with some quotes from Pulp Fiction, using inDesign to create an expressive and artistic take on the quotes. I’m new to all this, but I think my first iteration turned out pretty well:

For homework we’ll be working on the same typographical hierarchy project, but will start to combine variables we previously used only in isolation.

July 6th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Fundamentals, Typography | 2 Comments »  

Day 2 - July 3rd

We began our first project today - exploring Typographical Hierarchy. Karen began the class be explaining to us the concept of “Visualogic.” She told us that we can imagine a spectrum for designing a typographic (or other) communication, with pure logic on one end, and pure eye-candy on the other. Our goal as designers is to find the magic-middle where visual and logical meet to form a cohesive, meaningful whole.

Our first project is to take a text message we are given and use very simple typography to present the meaning clearly. Clearly in this case refers to being easy to read (i.e., not requiring multiple readings and avoiding psychological excise). The first step, we learned, is to analyze the given text (familiarization) so that we, as the designers, understand the intended meaning and various parts. It is our job to then digest this structure and hand it to the audience in optimal form.

We also briefly covered the criteria for any design solution. These criteria are outwardly simple, but may in fact prove to be difficult: a solution should be appropriate, engaging, and clear. Appropriate in that any given solution must fit the given constraints and accomplish the stated objective. Engaging, meaning that people must want to to view/use/interact with a solution or it will not be utilized. And clear in that a solution must not be psychologically taxing or it will not be effective (people don’t stop to read dense bricks of text stapled to a telephone pole).

July 6th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Fundamentals, Typography | No Comments »