Exercises from Graduate Typography
Typesetting & Layout:
Matthew Carter article
Layout: 8.5" x 11", 12 pages
Software: Adobe InDesign
Category: typography, typesetting, print, magazine layout
We were given a copy of Alex Wilkinson's article, "Man of Letters: Matthew Carter's Life in Type Design," from the New Yorker, and asked to create an experimental magazine spread. We began by defining various categories of content within the article, then chose a different typographic treatment for each category and applied those throughout the article.
The article was typeset in Matthew Carter's Univers typeface. The photograph of Carter is from the documentary Helvetica.
Typographic poster:
Imaginary photography show
Dimensions: 15" x 22.5"
Software: Adobe Photoshop
Category: typography, photography, poster design, image-to-type
For our final poster, as a reversal of the traditional design process, we selected an image and then created or found text that fit that image's content/theme. I used the photography of my incredibly talented and dear friend, Hamza Ahmed, an Aerospace Engineering Ph.D candidate by day and an amateur photographer by night, and created a poster for an imaginary photography exhibition of his work, using one of my favorite photos of his. As he also dabbles in visual design, I employed some of his own stylistic "quirks" (the use of periods, for example) to mark this as uniquely his.
Designer & typeface study:
Hermann Zapf & Palatino
Dimensions: 11.5" x 30"
Software: Adobe InDesign, Illustrator
Category: typography, photography, poster design, image-to-type
As part of a brief typography research project, I chose to examine the typeface Palatino. The first step was discerning its unique characteristics, and then displaying those unique sections in a 3x3 grid.
Next, we began to do research on the type designer (Hermann Zapf), the history of the typeface, and the period during which it was designed, and then began laying out all this information, along with our 3x3 grid, into a single cohesive article. After several iterations that ranged from mundane to experimental, I settled on this version.