Vignelli Typefaces

Vignelli's 6 typefaces

Garamond

• 1530
•  French renaissance punch cutter Claude Garamond
•  Features large counters in a and e
•  Often associated with elegance and readability 
• Suitable for a range of jobs.

Bodoni

• 1790 
• geometric appearance contrasts between thick and thin stokes
• used for displays, headlines and logos.
• romantic typeface
• vertical stress
• slight serif bracketing
• cupped top serifs on b,h,l, not parallel to baseline in some versions
• top & bottom serifs on C
• vertical tail of Q
• small upper bowl of g
• usually no middle serif on w
• large ball terminal of c

Century

• 1896 
• specifically designed to print century magazine
• extremely readable typeface 
• each letter form exaggerates the characteristics of each letter to make them look as different as possible therefore making it easier and quicker to read.

 Futura

• 1927
•  Paul Renner.
• All strokes made in a single line
• geometric
•  basic
• no ornamentation
• the ‘O’ is a perfect circle 
• the ‘j’ has no curve. 

Times

• 1932
•  created for the times newspaper
• used ‘monotype plantin 113’ as a basis 
• used for a classic yet practical look 
• combines legibility with economy
• used regularly in books and newspapers
• not very suitable for on screen use.

Helvetica

• Late 1950’s
•  the most neutral typeface based on ‘Akzidenz Grotesk’ typeface
•  large x height
•  large counters in ‘O, Q and C’ 
• oval double storied ‘a’
• counter in a is teardrop shape 

Study Task 02 - Kerndown

Kerning 
-The space between two individual letterforms.

Kerndown Task.
For this task we had to choose 3-5 letters out of a box. We wanted a mixture of ascenders, descenders and a capital letter, we ended up choosing letters that formed the word 'Hedge'.
We then had 60 seconds to arrange these letters to represent the type of company Simon and Ben gave us.



The first company we were given was a luxury car brand. We thought about existing luxury car brands such as range rover where this is found spaced out and written across the front of their cars. Therefore we recreated this with our word. (See image above)



The second company we were given was a budget food brand. For this we thought about basic brands such as tesco value who use a very simple design for their branding. We chose to keep the letters pretty close as though they had been typed out and not altered. (See image above)



For the third one we were given a condom company, we thought about the fact it needs to look quite fun as it's main duty would be to encourage young adults and teenagers to perform safe sex therefore this is their target audience. We decided just to slightly tilt the e's and keep the rest of the letters straight and close together to keep it looking reputable as it is a brand you need to trust. (See image above)


 The fourth company was an indie band, we struggled with this one a little bit because we found it difficult to rearrange our particular letterforms as they are all very round and difficult to slot together. We decided just to put them as close together as possible taking inspiration from bands such as blur and arctic monkeys. (See image above)



The final company was a IT company, we needed to reflect their professional ethos and create something with uniformity. We decided to space the letters out a little bit but not as much as we did for the luxury car brand as we wanted to maintain a level of seriousness and not be too playful with it.

Study Task 01 - Punctuation, Ligatures & Emojis

To begin our thought process me and Jasmine created a mind map (see above image) of common greetings/ farewells that you would usually use both in person and over text. We decided on ‘goodnight’ as we thought this would be a useful ligature if you were too tired to reply to a text but didn’t want the other person to think you were ignoring them, you could press one button and they would know you were going to sleep.  

As the image above shows, we originally developed our ideas from the letters g and n in an italic style of handwriting. The reason I used this curly font was to represent the nature of the word ‘goodnight’ it is a word that is floaty and usually gentle on the ears therefore I wanted to capture this in the way it appears on the page.

After doing some research into other ways to say goodnight we realised ‘night’ is a much more common phrase. We then created some ideas using the letters n and t (see image above), these were much easier letters to work with as they sat together easily when working digitally but were also much easier to write by hand.  

After working with both combinations of letters (see image above) we decided that the ‘nt’ ligatures worked better as the ‘gn’ looked a lot like a logo rather than a ligature.

Here you can see ‘nt’ in different fonts (see image above) as we tested the see if a serif or sans serif font worked best. We decided on a serif font as it relates back to the floaty nature of the word goodnight.

We then needed to put the ligature in context amongst other letters as we tested other fonts (see image above). We wanted to make sure the x height of the ligature was the same as the other letters in the font as well as the n sitting on the baseline and the t being level with the other descenders. We chose Garamond for our final design as we liked the width of the ligature in this typeface as it is a little bit wider and not as long as the others.

Displayed above is our final outcome with it featuring in a sentence so that people had a better chance of guessing what it was in our crit.

After feedback from the crit and listening to how other people approached the same task I realise now that more research into the word goodnight would’ve been beneficial. People who created interesting ligatures that stood out had done loads of research and instead of using the actual word they had used origins of the word.