Project 3: Typeface
Characteristics, Personality, Rhythm, and Flow
For September 23, 2021
The font that’s lucky enough to have been chosen by me is VAG rounded! I started out by jotting down some adjectives.
The, I got into some research for my short essay. It has a really interesting history, actually! All of the examples I’ve seen from this project in the past focused on, like, 300-year-old serif fonts, so it’s interesting to focus on a 40-year-old font that’s gunning to be neither serif nor sans serif (though in practice it behaves more like the latter).
For September 28, 2021
I began by doing some readability experiments testing if VAG rounded works as body copy as well as testing different type sizes, leading sizes, and line widths.
First up was picking the font for my body copy. I was curious if VAG rounded would work as a body copy or if it would be too “squishy” and dense when it was applied to longform text. So, I tried it out, along with a couple of other fonts that Adobe suggested to pair with VAG, IBM Plex Sans and URW DIN.
I decided to go with VAG as my body copy. When longform text is set in VAG, the distinct roundness of the terminals and the counters recede, so you get that sense of friendliness form it without being able to put your finger on why. It also works well as body copy in that it’s highly readable at a small size, being so consistent and having that tall x-height. I guess I should have seen that coming, since I think VAG (the company) did mostly use this for longform literature, but it’s nevertheless pretty neat how VAG works both for body copy as well as being distinctive enough for an interesting header font.
That being said, it sure is dense. Even the light weight of VAG feels as heavy as the regular weights of other fonts. I determined I would need to adjust the leading in order to reduce the density of the chunks of text.
Next up was type size. I tried a whole variety of sizes, and per Andrew’s suggestion last project, I tried some stuff I knew was going to be too large and too small just to get a vibe on if larger or smaller text was the way to go.
As I suspected, 12 was far too large and 9 was too small. Between 10 and 11, I felt 10 had the most comfortable and readable type-size-to-page-size ratio, with 11 being just slightly to large.
Next up was leading. I had upped the leading for the type size experiments, and I noticed that it felt much more readable, so I knew this round was going to be important. Once again, I tried a large variety of sizing, and I was impressed how readable the text remained even as I really pushed the limits of reasonable leading. I don’t know if that just speaks to the readability of the font or what, but in any case, I pushed the upper end all the way to 10/17 before it felt like it was getting out of hand.
I couldn’t decide between 14 and 15. I liked the space that 15 brought to the rather dense font, but when you got up close to read it, the lines felt just slightly too far apart. However, 14 felt just slightly too close together. Then, I remembered that the nature of the universe is entropy and I can make half-sizes if I want to, so I tried 14.5 leading and it ended up feeling just right.
Finally was column width. I had been working with text columns that were six columns wide on the document grid, or I think about 23 picas wide, and they were feeling to be about right, so I used that measurement as my middle point and tried a bunch of widths north and south of that.
The text columns that measured from six to seven columns wide on the grid (which, surprise surprise, were the widths that contained about 50 to 70 characters per line) ended up being the most readable ones, so I’ll be sticking in that range as I design my layouts. The shorter ones read too choppy, and the long ones were just hard to stay focused on, especially considering I want the reader to be moving laterally across the page from column to column.
With that information sorted, I then moved onto some thumbnailing to try to get an idea of how I might want to visually lay this out. I started by making a list of properties of the font, similar to my adjective list at the beginning of the project, to guide what kind of visual identity I’d like this to project:
- professional yet friendly
- utilitarian but not at the loss of being fun (like IKEA)
- restrained / simple
- no-nonsense
- pleasing
I played around with the idea of cars and old car ads for obvious reasons. Especially considering that many of the fonts other people have seem to have very long histories tied to the printing press or highbrow design, I think it’s neat how recent this font is, and how specifically it’s tied to the car industry — it’s quite unique to VAG. Besides, the font is a lot like a good car — it’s reliable and no-nonsense, but it’s still fun to drive.
I also toyed with the idea of making some sort of illustration with rounded geometric forms. VAG is, when it comes down to it, essentially a geometric sans serif font, so borrowing some of those forms could make for an interesting illustration. I could make it either a very abstract collection of shapes, or use them to make stylized illustrations of perhaps a car tire or factory machinery.
In all of my iterations, though, I tried to keep things pretty simple with plenty of white space. This font is meant to be utilitarian, so I wanted the layout to reflect that. That being said, I do plan on incorporating some color, since I do want it to be fun as well.
For September 30
I started working on the overall layout. I took the thumbnails I had and developed a few more based on the story I was sort of going for, which was my tagline: VAG Rounded is built like a good car; multipurpose, no-nonsense, reliable; yet fun to drive.
I wanted to make something with rounded forms and a bit of motion to it, to sort of imply the motion of a car, and play with the idea of the font being appropriate for a variety of contexts. After I talked to Yoshi a bit about my ideas, he mentioned something about the font looking like fridge magnets, which ended up being my jumping-off point.
I first started with a pretty literal interpretation of the fridge magnet thing and moved on from there. Vicki said she felt the fridge magnet tiles along with all the other pictures were distracting, so I had a bit more fun and then tried to tone it down a little.
I started by decreasing the size of the title and setting it all on the same baseline to make it look a little more professional and put-together. However, I kept it relatively large and in regular (the bolder of the two weights) to give it a little more gravity, since I do want it to be the first thing you see in the hierarchy (followed by the callout and then the body copy).
Then, I tried out a variety of images and layouts.
^ I actually like this one, but I think it loses the sense of motion I was going for. Vicki mentioned something about seeing the tagline about cars and wanting to see a car to help place some context, so I ended up making sure there was at least one car-related thing in every layout I tried. In any case, it’s not particularly unorthodox in the grand scheme of design that I’ve seen, and for a title that talks about things being “well-rounded”, I think the predisposition for straight perpendicular lines isn’t quite appropriate.
^I also like this one a lot actually. The car image brings a lot of motion to the whole situation. However, I feel like this spread doesn’t immediately register as being about a font (but maybe that’s something that would normally be resolved with context) and was rather stationary once you get outside the image. It also wasn’t quite as reflective of the broad variety of uses I wanted to portray. In any case, I was receiving a lot of interest in the fridge magnet design and felt it was more interesting anyway, so I decided to continue developing it further.
^Similar vibes on these ones as I started to develop the sort of scattery style I ended up going with. I’m still on the fence between whether or not I prefer the keys to be at varying amounts of rotation or snapped vertically, and that’s something I’ll probably continue to explore if I have the time. I also, per Vicki’s suggestion, tried implementing one of the letters from my layout as a drop cap, which I felt helped tie the whole thing together.
^ Finally, I moved the green bug and the Audi picture up above the text, since I felt it helped make a better balance. I also moved the black “V” key in on the left page up and to the right a bit, closer to the drop cap B, in order to help string the two pages together using the proximity and the similarity of the keyboard keys across the spread.
I’m not sure how I feel about this overall. It’s very readable, which was also the consensus from crit, so I’m not worried about that. However, I wonder if it’s interesting enough. I feel like it may be too rectangular-bound, and I don’t know if the black on white is too standard. However, I’m trying to keep in mind what Vicki pointed out today: that this is a spread, not a poster, so it doesn’t need to command attention from across a room, but rather be curious enough to prompt you to stop and read it. However, I like the overall vibe that’s happening and the motion implied in the layout.
So, we’ll see what happens. I’ll probably come back to this after I’ve had some time to step away from it and take a look once the animation bit of the project is done. In the meantime, I think I’ve gotten to a pretty good stopping point.
For October 17, 2021
Okay, we’re back, having just finished the video. Coming back to the spread, I actually like it a lot more than I did a few weeks ago. I think I was looking at it and wanting it to be more of a poster, since we’d just completed the poster project, but looking at it now, I think it communicates well as a book page.
I did make a few final changes informed by my video, though, the main one being I changed the color of the background to be the off-white I was using in my video. I felt the white was quite harsh, and I felt like the colored background helped pull the two sides of the spread together more.
Then, to compensate for the color change in the background, I brightened the white on the computer keys and the white border around the car.
Finally, I rounded the corners of the Audi car image. I had been trying to do that earlier on in the process but InDesign simply refused to work. However, I finally got the rounded corner options to work again. I feel like it, like the background color, helps bring the two sides of the spread together.
So, here she is as a complete spread!
This project, though it was a shorter one, had some important takeaways. For one, making a spread is definitely not the same thing as making a poster. I think coming hot off the poster project, I wanted to make something large and graphic that would draw you in from a distance, but a spread doesn’t need to do that — you’re already holding the book. It just needs to make you stop turning pages. Secondly, it was another good lesson in hierarchy. It’s important to lead your eye around the page in order, especially when you have multiple bodies of text working (a title, subtitle, and body text). Finally, typesetting is a lot more involved of an art than I thought it was, but I gotta say, I actually enjoyed doing it quite a bit. Looking back at all the times I got annoyed throughout my grade school education for having to turn in times new roman double spaced papers, I now have typographical reasons to attach to why I hated that format so much.
On the whole, I’m pretty happy with the final product. Onto the next project!