Design Principles OUGD404 Seminar Tuesday the 10th of December

As a starting exercise we looked at the squares of text we did for homework set in the last seminar. This brought us to the subject that block and italic fonts were the hardest to work with because they are created to work within a certain range of point sizes. Orientation can have an effect on legibility too; with landscape paper the eye wants to read sideways and portrait creates a downward pull, this is why we had to create our homework in a square. It creates a flexibility of directional reading allowing manipulation of the eye.

So, if gothic and roman fonts era clearly the most legible and easy to work with why do we bother with other type faces such as block and script? They provide something we are always striving for in visual design which is character and personality which in turn creates tone of voice and depth of meaning to what is being created. When combined with image the combined connotations of a character filled type can create an entirely new meaning (possible through the juxtaposition of tone). These varying character in type is the reason we have typefaces which create fonts that work together but have a great variation of tone of voice. The balance between character and legibility is an on going battle. The fact that something is illegible can often draw the eye to it. This control of where the eye is drawn in a piece of design and in what order it is done is called a hierarchy, and is a major reason for variations in size, placement and fonts within a single piece. 

We then went on to choose a page from a newspaper and draw a quick thumbnail of it, to start to become aware of what we see first in a printed page and why.