Still looking at developing the design for my Type Specimen Sheet, I tried using elements from different designs and seeing if they could potentially work in other designs. I have tried to incorporate the large “a” into this design but I feel it doesn’t have enough visual interest to replace the unusual cropping of the letterform.
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Against my judgement, I decided to move elements around on the designs which my tutor prefered more then I did. A point raised in my feedback was the fact my tutor preferred the design with the large “a” on it as it gives a better sense of variation and scale. This is a valid point as I do need something to draw the attention of my audience rather then just designing with function being the purpose.
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This post shows a point which my tutor picked up on in my feedback. Using the Story tool in InDesign, I was able to hang the quotation marks outside of the text box which meant the lines of text could align to the same point.
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Taking even more of a minimalistic route, I carried out another short task to create this alternative layout which would potentially spark more ideas which I could experiment with.
I started a new day of work by spending a short amount of time experimenting with the content I already had created for my previous Villards style poster designs. This was a great way to loosen myself up a bit and come away from the style I was already focusing on in order to unlock more concepts and ideas which may be more effective. As you can probably tell I wanted to explore a style of design which would have a large amount of focus on the individual character forms. “a” being one of the most used and stylish characters, it was a good choice to have it featured and then start to form content around the letter which bleeds off of the page.
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As well as developing my adaption of the Villards Diagram (the landscape versions) I still was going to to experiment with incorporating the required elements into the more common Villards Diagram layout. This would enable me to have an alternative approach which I could revisit later in the process.
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I wanted to start the process by simply getting all of the elements in to the design so I could then really start to think about whether the ideas and themes I was visualising would actually work with the required content. I have started the development on a 10 column grid formed around the body section I created, influenced by Villards Diagram, which holds 7/10 of the columns on the page.
I spent a bit of time working on a column grid which corresponded to the page aswell as the Villards Diagram section. This would allow me then to think about small headers, footers and caption elements which I could incorporate in to the design outside of the Villards section. I feel 7-9 columns within the body is the most effective number to work with so I may change the column grid to 9 if I struggle with design layout in the future.
From research into the early development of the Bodoni typeface, I understood that the characters are based on a 3×3 ruled grid, created by Giambattista, to have a structured basis to the font. These two screenshots simply show me trying to see whether a 3×3 typeface structure could be translated for the purpose and use on a poster layout.
visual thinking 