Typography is the art style of words and sentences that are readable and legible. 95% of information in the world is typography of some sort. There are many different styles of typography and some of the most famous and influential ones are Swiss Style and New Wave, which were both used by a designer we learnt about today, Wolfgang Weingart.
Swiss design style is a typography style that was created in the 1950s which has many notable features that have influenced designers and even still has a big influence in the design industry today. It’s characteristics are minimalistic, blocky layout with different shapes and usually a sans serif typeface. It’s purpose is to make information easy to understand while also looking aesthetic. It often uses grid systems in the design phase and some famous Swiss style designers are Ernst Keller, Armin Hofmann, and Max Miedinger.
New wave is another typography style and it was created in the 1970s and was pioneered by Wolfgang Weingart. Wolfgang wanted to try and experiment more with the Swiss style so he ‘broke’ the principles when he was creating his designs. His designs had elements at different angles, sentences started where they shouldn’t start, and he used different techniques that hadn’t been properly explored yet such placing large shapes under words that were to be emphasised, or lines through words.
We also looked at Jan Tschichold, who was also an important typography designer in the 20th century. He was most famous for his influence on asymmetrical typography and is also known as ‘the father of typography’. His work was seen as a threat to the Nazi party, as Germany traditionally used blackletter type. He fled to Switzerland and was his work was seen as ‘un-German’.
We then looked at some letraset sheets that Paul brought in for us. I thought that it was quite interesting that these were commonly used as recently as the 80s. They give a fresh and clean look to typography. I decided to make my name using a Helvetica letraset sheet and I think it came out pretty good.
We then created a news headline for musician ‘Hozier’ using at least two different typefaces. I used Great Sailor for the heading, and IBM Plex Serif for the rest of the text. I think is looks professional and the design suits Hozier’s deep music style with the black and white theme.
I used bold and italic font to highlight specific information such as the name of the tour, and song names. I’m very pleased with how the design turned out.
Then in Figma we had to create 9 different frames and using 1 letter, had to make 9 different variations of the letter to try and test our creativity while being restricted. We could use different sizes, turn the letter, but could only use black and 1 letter. It was difficult at first trying to come up with different ideas but this is what I came up with: