Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Text messaging while driving prevents you from seeing what really matters

I think this ad is awesome and does a great job at illustrating its point. found it when I was looking for typography inspiration on a blog compiling a list of interesting advertisements. I love the style of the writing too, how it all fits in together and how the words vary in size. It's kind of a good inspiration for my font specimen poster as well.

What the Font had a seizure when I tried to upload this image due to the amount of characters, so I couldn't get a font name from them, but I think it's Helvetica. I tend to gravitate towards sans-serif fonts as serifs seem old, and old things scare me.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

ITC Avant Garde

Herb Lubalin was one of the most prominent graphic designers of the 60s and 70s, it's fitting then that he would go on to create one of the most widely abused typefaces in the world, Avant Garde. Originally created just to serve as an instantly recognizable, futuristic logo for the Avant Garde magazine, a full-fledged typeface eventually came out due to so many requests for it in 1970. It was released through Lubalin, Burns & Co. which later became known as the ITC. Most of the creators of Avant Garde agree that nobody really understood the point of it are quoted as saying "The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde".

"Love is the Movement"

To Write Love On Her Arms is a non-profit organization dedicated to finding help for people suffering from abuse, addiction, depression, and self-injury. It's exploded through the music scene in the last few years and chances are, if you've been to any concert that isn't country or rap you'll see someone wearing a TWLOHA shirt.

What the font couldn't figure out what the typeface was but I think it's Avant Garde due to the A in "arms". I like the font style though as I'm a fan of sans serif fonts. I think this logo works very well to identify the organization because it is instantly recognizable on all of their products. I like the kerning on the letters as well although I think the alternative character on the "A" at the bottom was a bit pointless.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Cigarette butts count as litter, too.



I saw this while I was googling information on smoking to win a pointless debate with a friend and, as I have a hard time taking anything serious seriously, I thought it was funny in a nerdy way. It's a great play on words because if you understand that the boldness of a character is described as its weight, you get the decreasing font weight throughout the sentence, it's still effective if you don't though because you still understand that the words are becoming "skinnier" while you read something about reducing body weight.

WhatTheFont tells me it's an Avenir font though it's not sure whether it's Avenir Book or Avenir Medium. I enjoy this font and I've used it before on flyers because I believe it to be very modern looking and clean, which is what made me notice it in the first place. It's a sans serif font and though serifs are supposed to guide our eyes, I find them to be a distraction and that using them would have taken away from the effectiveness of this clean cut advertisement. The typography is great, it stands out, it's kerned nicely and fills an adequate portion of the ad space. I like how the "(one lung at a time)" bit is placed under the word "WEIGHT" to sort of balance out the boldness at the beginning of the sentence.

Boring Introduction.

Hey there. This will be my blog for my Typography I class, which you already know because let's face it, unless you've been assigned to read this, you're not going to be reading this. This is the first actual design based class I've ever taken and I am very excited. I became interested in design in 2005 when a friend's band needed a layout done for their MySpace (back when it was still cool). I had just learned to use <big> <small> and the strikethrough tag and displayed it hideously all over my MySpace page, which is why they thought I was qualified to create an entire layout with working code I guess. Obviously, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing but neither did they so they thought I was a genius and it worked out great. Eventually I taught myself how to actually code, use Adobe products, and make things I'm not completely embarrassed by now, but I still don't know the core values of design so I'm very excited to learn.