Thanks to everyone who gave our January contest a try. We had a total of three people who completed 100% of the answers correctly, including Troy Date, Andrew Pritikin, and Craig Margaret. Additionally, there were a few ‘close calls’ including  Lauralee Carbone and Katie Fleming.

Randomly selected among those that got 100% right was Craig Margaret. Nicely done! We will be sending him a $50 gift certificate go Amazon.com in addition to a set of our hand printed coasters.

Stay tuned for our second contest – titled William Shakespeare, marketing copywriter – to be delivered later this month!

In case you wanted to know the answers, they are 1: The Matrix, 2: The Godfather, 3: Harry Potter, 4: Twilight, 5: The Lord of the Rings, 6: Star Wars, 7: Woody Allen.

Garamond is one of a handful of typefaces that designers of all eras return to again and again.

Apple used the condensed form in the late eighties, and it became the quintessential typographic solution for business communications in the early nineties.

People who make lists of the most readable fonts tend to pick Garamond first.  It is ideally suited for book design. The Harry Potter books were set in Adobe Garamond, as are The Hunger Games books – even Dr. Seuss. It is also a staple for technical documentation for high end technology firms (like Nvidea).

It’s a remarkable thing that a 500 year old design would be perpetually connected with innovation and fresh, modern storytelling. The reason is at heart very simple: Garamond is a masterpiece of form and function. It works. Seen from distance or up close, it is simply beautiful *and* functional.

Designers categorize Garamond as a humanist typeface, meaning that it comes from a human (i.e. handwriting). Upon inspection, you can see how the forms were created by a brush with a wedge tip by a right handed person. If type is like an illustration, what does the quality of line reveal about the person who made it? To my mind, Garamond reveals a combination of intelligence, warmth, and mastery of control. It reminds me of Bach’s music -  particularly such things as the Brandenburg Concertos or the Goldberg Variations.

Yet, there are ways in which the type departs from its humanist origins. In translating handwriting to movable types, type design began to evolve from being about ink to being about metal. In the example above, Jenson – which predates Garamond by only a few decades – is more closely linked with handwriting. In comparison, Garamond seems sturdier, more in alignment with a horizontal and vertical grid. This is the reason why Garamond (and not Jenson) is fresh and relevant today and will remain so for years to come. It is merely a first step in an evolution of type that would unfold for centuries to come – with successive type designers each attempting to reconcile an organic flowing motion of handwriting within an outlying grid.

It’s simple!  Visit this link and complete the questions. The questions use the theme of typography dovetailing with writing to create tone and feeling. We’ve taken quotes from popular movies and typeset them in the manner of the posters. The goal is to correctly guess which movie poster the typeface was used in.

The reward? Those with the most correct answers will qualify to win a $50 gift certificate to Boundary Bay, or Amazon in addition to a set of our hand printed letterpress coasters. You have until the end of January 2012 to enter. The winner will be announced the first week of February.

Have fun!

the source material

The combination of new location, a daily bike commute, and quick daily walks have made Becca and I much more sensitive to the changing seasons this year. Readers of previous posts will remember that leaves are of particular interest to us this fall.

We were especially struck with the incredible richness and range of colors, and Becca had a great idea to use them in our office entry room signage. The concept was to isolate each leaf against a perfectly white background.

three of the fifty-four leaves we used

Although completely natural, the project had the feeling of a design exercise – with the different size, shape, and patterns of each – creating a sense of both diversity and unity that makes the natural world endlessly fascinating. It reminded me of the evolution of typography, how the interplay of form and function propelled countless designers to reinterpret the same essential forms, over and over again.

a close up

Most striking is that the leaves were all gathered within a few blocks of our office. In an urban setting of concrete and cars, it is easy to think of the natural world as something “out there.” Yet, the diversity of the these leaves tells another story; we have only to open our eyes and see.

the finished result

A call out to the person who wrote down “leaf” with a felt pen on a leaf at Maritime Park. Somehow, among the millions – perhaps billions of leaves – we found your message and included it in our project. What are the odds?

Thinking creatively means making contextual decisions that are not always informed by an absolute set of opinions or values. For example: some people hate hyphens and never use them, but “real designers” know that sometimes hyphens have to be used… usually to avoid something even worse.

I say that because recently we’ve been involved in a series of conversations about capitalization. Thrilling, right? Sad to say, in my case, it’s a subject that continues to grow ever more interesting. In any case, recent conversations on caps has led me to believe solutions are found in thinking of capitals contextually – not in absolute terms.

So… here is a designer’s exploration of the different ways of thinking about caps.

Title Case
We Rarely Use Title Case Because  It is So Distracting And Hard To Read. The Added Contrast of Contrast Caps Makes it A Good Choice for Trying to Make a Subhead Stand Out Against Other Competing Information. Ok, enough. I think title caps makes stilted, phony language. To my mind’s ear, it has the same strained, self importance of  James Lipton – as per this excellent parody by David Cross.

ALL CAPS
 Used in body copy, all caps reads as SHOUTING… but for subheads and labels ALL CAPS looks more geometric and structural. Where other caps treatments have an uneven top or bottom surface, all caps is inform. The shapes it produces can fit – Tetris like – into structures of content. All caps seems more like a label, and has a more authoritative feel to it. To the eye, all caps has a quality that makes the eye slip, tractionless, over the surface, as per:

lower case
Lower case is easily read. Each letter has a different shape that gives traction to the eye as it alights the different words. Lower case is casual, accommodating to the reader, and natural. Lower case is 98.6 degrees. The different vertical space of each letter occupies has a distinctly musical quality to me, as per:

Sentence  case.
Like lower case,  sentence case is easily read. An initial capital separates each sentence as a separate thought or helps direct the eye to the beginning of a line. For my way of thinking, if you are not writing in complete sentences there is no need to use sentence case.

Wrap up
As designers, of course we use lots of different caps schemes all the time. There is no universal standard… just whichever works best for your application. Think contextually!

When we heard the theme for this year’s Mt. Baker Planned Parenthood fundraiser event was “Tango and Tapas” we knew we wanted to letterpress the invitations, so we went about finding a combination of Argentinian type to use with a dramatic tango dance image.  We chose a color combination of a vibrant orange and a dark purple, which seemed both appropriate for the theme as well as the fall season.

We use photopolymer plates on our Vandercook SP15 cylinder press to print all of our work. Below is the orange ink and plate set up and ready to print. While a motor drives the ink rollers, each printed impression requires a full hand crank of the cylinder.

I still love following a project through all stages of the production process when I can. I’m lucky enough to have access to a large guillotine cutter [below] at a local copy/print shop – my old stomping grounds. There is nothing more satisfying than a sharp blade making a crisp cut into a stack of paper.

Delivering the boxed and wrapped invitations is a bit playing Santa Claus.

The invitations will arrive in the mail as such….

…but built into the design is a little puzzle, rewarding those who might be paying extra attention.

Developing an identity for the Bellingham/Whatcom County Commission Against Domestic Violence raised some challenging questions about design and marketing that we hadn’t encountered before.

The Commission works with a variety of community partners to detect, prevent, and help people recover from domestic violence issues. Their identity needed to reflect the organization’s role of understanding domestic violence in an abstract way (i.e. through statistics) while still being emotionally present in the human impact this issue has on our community.

The balancing act between rational and emotional is inherently tricky, and adding to that challenge was the powerful, extreme nature of domestic violence – a thing which by its nature is usually hidden from view.  In our explorations of the material, suggestions of violence usually came off as maudlin, corny, or voyeuristic where outright depictions were  blisteringly negative – probably the worst thing to show for an organization devoted to stopping violence. Can you draw a picture depicting the absence of domestic violence? Neither can I.

My comfortable little life of art books, typography, cats, and chamber music seemed utterly inadequate for the task at hand. Even my language seemed lacking, even darkly, comically, perverse. This was not a subject you could “take a stab at” or build a “killer app” for.

Divide and conquer, indeed. Our first major step forward was thinking about creating a solid, believable foundation for the brand. Fontfont’s Sanuk seemed a perfect choice. The handwriting based, endoskeleton of Sanuk seemed smart, precise, and slightly feminine to me, and its streamlined look made it look perfectly suited for a government agency.  Used in everything from reports to posters, Sanuk would help create a controlled presence for the organization that would stay fresh and relevant for years to come.

Sanuk, an elegant, versatile type family integrates all of Commission's materials

By itself, Sanuk would be coldly rational… too much so. A collage system would act as ballast to the type, contrasting the fluid precision of the letterforms with a rougher, imperfect, more colorful illustration style. Effects applied consistently to each would impose a coherent look among drastically different photos, helping them read more as symbols instead of actual things.

collage component: intervention

Our content selections were guided by four emotional touch points we identified: control, loss, intervention, and community – with the last concept envisioned as the culminating, positive  step of a sequence.

collage component: community

As a system, these pieces could be combined and recombined in a variety of ways to make covers for reports or other assets, website graphics, or other applications, creating a stable, but adaptable platform the Commission could use in its materials for years to come.

collage application - report cover

Thinking about structure in your marketing materials is about how you decide to use visual relationships to reinforce your message. It means thinking beyond what is being said, and exploring the how.

As always, the process begins with focusing on your message, ideally your one message.  Deciding on a core message is often the biggest challenge, especially if multiple decision makers are involved. However, once you have it, the rest is, in a sense, “just details.”

In the ad above, profitability is the key message; the function of the ad is to help the audience trust the company and the product it sells. Conveying trust is a task well suited to structural thinking, as is evidenced by the language of trust  (e.g. “a solid partnership,” “an upright citizen,” “a stand-up guy,” a “shaky deal”).

I think it’s easier to trust something that’s perfectly centered and perfectly straight, than a crooked something that leans one way or another. That was the reason behind conceiving the middle as a backbone for this ad. It connects the perfect vertical of the man’s weight bearing leg with the copywriting and the frame holding the various logos. I think of these organizational elements as power lines (like power chords), combining the function of support beams, taut string, and a live wire.  Not using them at all creates visual oatmeal, using too many is like a pile of glass shards.  A handful is just right.

Color provides another critical point of connectivity, in this case linking the message with the logo – a relationship reinforced by both elements using the same type set at the same size. Visually, we are prompting the audience to associate profitability with the Fireline brand. Conveying this message verbally and visually makes it more interesting and believable.

A final structural component is the consistent use of spacing between the various elements – depicted above through the lines and squares of equal length.  Building consistency into a design in this fashion subtly communicates a methodical, professional reliability into the message, but I think the real purpose is to be invisible. We don’t want waste the audience’s attention on these details. Their function is always to support – never compete with-  the primary message.

I’ve found that thinking structurally about design has helped us convey messages relating to corporate success, trust, reliability, and strength. However, there are times when a too structured approach ruins a concept by slowly draining the life out of it. The middle ground between too much chaos or order is different for every project or person. As always, the best strategy is to understand how the choices you are making figure into the final product.

Type is present in essentially all marketing communications. Other than color, perhaps no other visual element plays a more crucial role in building a consistent presence across multiple forms of media. Yet, type is something few businesses use effectively, with even large established companies continuously making arbitrary choices with type. Those choices undermine their long term ability to differentiate themselves and detract from the professionalism and credibility of the materials they create.

As is common for our industry, part of Shew Design’s branding process is building a type palette in much the same way as a color palette, usually a combination of typefaces designed to work with one another for years to come.  As designers, our tools and processes put us in an ideal world of sorts – one that makes it easy to follow our own guidelines. Not so with others, and with good reason: technology and the marketplace create so many barriers to managing type easily and effectively.

Here are some strategies we’ve used to help clients harness type to create an effective brand presence.

Documented standards that are accessible, understood, and observed

Standards can address which typefaces to use and how to use them, but standards are useless if they can’t be easily accessed, people don’t know how to follow them, or if no one is responsible for enforcing them. As a general rule, we encourage a division of labor where people who create content are different from the people who approve content.  We always make standards available online, through printed manuals, and when appropriate, as stylesheets in programs such as Microsoft Word.

The PDF format

Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) can embed most fonts, allowing people to deliver documents with branded typography without requiring the viewer to purchase fonts [???]. In addition, form fields can use specific fonts and can be used to make templates for report covers, CD labels, and similar pieces that can be modified by anyone without requiring a purchase or special skills. These templates can be combined with preprinted materials to create attractive materials that are completely branded and easily changed using free software.

discounts on type purchases

If cost is the primary reason against using type consistently, savings can be built into the branding process by selecting type families that can be purchased in bulk or by buying cheaper versions of established typefaces. As with most things, you get what you pay for but there are deals to be had. For example: older versions of Freehand and Illustrator would often come with hundreds of type families free. A person who is willing to invest a little time could purchase several hundred dollars worth of type for only a few dollars.

Consistent use of default type

A two tier type strategy could use more interesting branded type solutions for marketing applications while using standard type (i.e. Times and Arial) for everyday use. The disconnect between the two materials can be softened by using assets such as logos, preprinted materials, graphical headers, style sheets, etc. to maintain consistency.

An attitude of restraint

Given the wealth of free decorative fonts and effects available, it’s possible to endlessly tinker with designs without significantly improving them. Before beginning the process of exploring type, we recommend you considering focusing more on content and less on formatting, picking simple solutions will hold up for multiple projects. Simple choices almost always work better for long term solutions.

I think no other aspect of a designer’s work is more telling than their use of type.   It shows their understanding of culture,  the subject matter, and the audience in very subtle but important ways.

For the rest of us, type doesn’t have to be complicated.  A few simple “common sense” rules can help you create more attractive, easy to read documents. Here is one such rule.

Years ago, the Apple II had a very simple game in which you thought of an animal, and it tried to guess what it was. The opening question was always “does it swim in the water or live in the land.” The corresponding rule with type is simply: “was it created by a human hand or by a machine?”

“Made by hand” means part of a typographic tradition closely aligned with handwriting. In most cases, this means type with serifs and with a stress. Take an “O” and make it huge. Does it look like a circle made by a machine or does it lean slightly to the left? Does it  have a stroke that gets thinner or thicker as if it  was written by a right handed person? This one observation can tell you a lot about a font, and how to use it.

According to this approach, Times New Roman is by hand; Arial is made by machine.

time and arial - machine vs. person

If it was created by hand, then simply treat it as  handwriting… meaning: used mixed  caps, be very sparing with bold and underline, and colors, and don’t reverse it (meaning white text on a black background), and don’t justify or letterspace it.  Basically,  just keep it simple and use default settings.

If  the type was created by a machine, then it will be much more accommodating of the permutations listed above. The type is designed for flexibility. Think of it as putty that can be stretched and molded.

Of course, there are many exceptions to this rule but this provides a very helpful guideline for creating documents that are attractive and easy to read.