Type in the Wild

an analysis of text by Cori Bush

On a daytrip to Tallahassee to see some old friends I was eating sunflower seeds I got at a local Asian market.

The dynamic layout of text on this packaging is really interesting. It works differently when looking at the text landscape or vertically. There are three different fonts in use: the bold serif, a sans serif for the body text, and an illustrative logotype.

In terms of visual hierarchy when looking at the package vertically, the text box on the right being transparent makes it stand out first by having the bold text over the light brown of the paper packaging rather than the red ink. My eyes are first drawn to what the product is, sunflower seeds. Then my eyes move to the right to see that they are roasted. I moved down the column to then see the flavor of the seeds. I think this is a really unique way of reading texts that are in alternate orientations. Even though the word “roasted” would technically come before “sunflower seeds” in paragraph form, it reads as coming after because the text is rotated.

In the body text giving a product description, the logotype for ChaCha is bold and almost twice the size of the text. This creates a visual repetition adjacent to the larger logo at the top and instills brand familiarity to the viewer. My only issue with the typography is very poor translation of the body text, which is a massive run-on sentence and is finished with the company slogan which is not italicized or otherwise denoted.

After spending the day around the city we needed some food and agreed on Mediterranean. I looked through some restaurants in the area and, after seeing how horrendous the design was for the entire branding of this place, we knew that the food was going to be amazing. The sign itself is actually pretty successful in terms of legibility, but by reading it you are able to see the issues with it.

The font pairing lacks a great deal of seriousness in portraying a business. The logotype bugs me because the curvature of the stylized text, “Yerushalmi”, does not line up with the blue lines surrounding the clipart logo. I am a fan of how the descenders in “Cafe” meet at the arch of the logo. I think the difference in title and sentence capitalization is fine, but the inclusion of words in all caps, especially being in Comic Sans, adds to the cheesiness of the overall typography. The color hierarchy works well but I think the top two paragraphs of the body could be combined to be something like, “Fresh, delicious, and healthy authentic, homemade food from the heart of Jerusalem,” and logistically some of those adjectives should be cut down. The second sentence also lacks and Oxford comma.

There is a common theme of poor design and typography among Mediterranean restaurants. I am currently working on a rebrand for Taste of Jerusalem in a graphic design class and a lot of these font pairing issues are being addressed.

Guitar pedals and music gear in general is very subjective in taste. What sounds good to one person can be completely undesirable to another. Because there are so many guitar pedal manufacturers and the differences in circuitry are relatively minimal, there is a heightened focus on the physical design. Electro-Harmonix is a company that has been around since the sixties and their quality and branding has stood the test of time. I have two pedals by them on my board and they are both gorgeous.

The Oceans 11 Reverb pedal caught my eye when I was looking to add some space and texture to my guitar tone. Looking at the box there is excellent hierarchy. Nestled in between the ethereal illustration, your eye is brought to the horizon where the name of the pedal, “Oceans 11”, is. Moving down to the word “reverb”, it is tracked larger which I think is a very clever, subtle way of portraying how the pedal adds space and breath to your sound. My eye moves up to the moon and into the sky where the brand’s name is. The logotype for Electro-Harmonix is kind of dated compared to their modern designs, but feels right for a guitar gear company.

The two very bold sans serif fonts for the pedal name look very clean and pair well together, though I think that the choice for “reverb” feels a little too robotic for something as ambient as reverberation. On the opposite side of that coin, the pedal is truly a machine with so many options and

Bumper stickers are supposed to be legible in a similar way that billboards are. When driving you don’t have much time to give attention to text, and if something is illegible to a point where it is annoying or distracting it can completely lose it’s ability to disseminate information or worse, be a hazard to drivers. Bumper stickers should be immediately digestible. While driving on campus this week I was behind a car that had this sticker on it. By coincidence I was following it for a while, all the way down University Parkway until Davis Highway. This whole time I was trying to fully read the bumper sticker with no success. For a while I was only able to read “honk if you’re horny” and my interest was peaked. This part of the sticker was perfectly legible from quite a distance. The top line of text was bold and commanding, and the fun font choice for “horny” broke the tone a bit in a good way. I could infer from that information that the next word in the sentence was most likely going to be “for”, even though that word was far too small to be legible. But even with this deduction I still was left unknowing of who or what I may or may not be horny for, thus indecisive of if I should honk or not. I assumed it was a band based on the traditional death metal stylization. I drove for another short while until we got to a stop light. I could finally see that the sticker came from a band I am actually familiar with, Gatecreeper. They played in Pensacola not too long ago so I assume that the driver of the car purchased it then. This is a pretty common issue that I have with hardcore and metal bands. I have seen so many flyers for shows and tours where I cannot read most of the names of the bands on the bill. Gatecreeper’s logo is legible, but definitely not from a distance. Some bands’ logos are not from any distance.

Designing Tee-Shirts is a field of design that ties typography and illustration in a way that necessitates cohesive style, legibility, and instantly appealing graphics. A few years ago I was going through racks and racks of shirts at a thrift store when this immediately stopped my mindless skimming. It is perfect. I have gotten so many compliments on it, and rightfully so. The color scheme, the dog-car-hybrid illustration, and the charming, vintage typography comes together to create something bigger than the sum of its parts.

The cartoony bubble letters for “Speedy McWeenie’s” convey whimsicality in a very retro way. It almost feels like the title screen for a Looney Tunes film. The illustrated character and little sparkles, as well as the sphere surrounding these elements definitely play into that. The word “speedy” stays relatively horizontal to its own letters despite being angled a bit, but “McWeenie’s has a good amount of bounce and movement as the words spans from left to right. The letters touching each other helps unify everything throughout this wonkyness, as opposed to using something like Gambado Scotch or Gambado Sans at a default, where the angle and the movement of the letters is predetermined and the negative space between them makes how offcenter things are become much more apparent. I have been messing with these two fonts a bit recently and will definitely move into creating my own flavor of movement in customizing typography. “Hot Rod Shop” follows a more uniform path of movement almost like a ~. The change in font to a serif that still maintains the fun of the heading text is such a

Coffee. A thing that I love. A thing that I grind down in order to make, on average, eight shots of espresso a day. A thing that I have a physical and psychological dependence on. And aside from my own questionable habits, a thing that has shaped human culture for centuries. Coffee is a social ritual that has long brought families and communities together, giving them enough energy to build society as we know it. Today, the coffee shop is a very prominent figure of the American way of life. They are where tinder dates happen, business deals are made, and so many Canvas discussion posts get written by college students. Graphic design and visual language is very important to these establishments. The aura of a coffee shop is largely driven my its design from logos, illustrations, and typography to interior decoration.

Coffee Guy Cafe, a local business that my fiancee is a shift manager at, is probably my least favorite looking coffee shop in Pensacola. I use her employee discount often to get bags of coffee. They are just blank bags that a sticker label is placed on. For only being a logo and a few lines of text, the design is pretty cluttered and busy. There are four different fonts in use and four different line lengths stacked on top of each other. The logotype is a very clean, slightly rounded, nondescript sans serif that I take no issue with, despite how much I do not like the logomark and how the bean icons are not rotated to match the curvature of the text. The informative text has awful leading. The name of the roast, “Papa New Guinea”, is touching the border line. The serif on the descender of the “p” is curved, so there are two points of contact with the line and about a pixel of negative space that irks me. There is a pointless period after “2018”. On the second line from the bottom a cursive text is used, but not entirely. The designer, who I have met, must have noticed that typing out “100%” in this typeface would be illegible, and rather than using anything else, decided to write it in a serif with a different weight. I have never thought that using center-justified text for various lines looks great, especially when the line-spacing is so unstandardized like in this application. This leads to moments of tension and a very sloppy layout.

I read quite a bit and almost everything that I consume is found at thrift stores. Because there are walls of books with the just spines facing out I am particularly drawn to buzz words in titles, color, and typefaces. This book caught my eye for some reason and when I pulled it out from the shelf I was pleasantly surprised by this very dynamic typography.

The entire cover is done in one rounded serif typeface with two fonts, one being bold. The title of the book is in a bold but not overly heavy font. It stands at the top of the hierarchy not only because of this but because of its setting which has so much movement in it. There is no defined justification except for two of the words on the hard left because most of the words are nested within the capitals or ascenders of the word underneath. I get the visual sense of each word falling down into the next like a game of Tetris. I feel that this stacking effect plays into what I read on the inner flap of the book cover. I implies that everything can be balanced perfectly and all it takes is one thing to happen to one of the pieces and everything could fall apart. Especially with the title, I really enjoy how this sense of a fragile dynamic is portrayed through text. I wish that this was pushed further in the smaller text towards the top right. If we were following the gravity of the stack, some of those words towards the end would fall down.

In the sphere of “Live, Laugh, Love” design there is a lot of bad typography, illustrations, and cliches. This happens to be my mother’s aesthetic which leads to me coming to possess quite a few pieces as gifts throughout the years. Heartwarming to see a token of her love that reminds me that I am her “Jun8hine”.

Because there are few repeating letters it is hard to tell what the deal is with these two typefaces, or if they are hand-lettering. I feel like a designer for this type of mass-produced merchandise would not go through the process of writing these words out multiple times, so for the purpose of this exercise I will work under the assumption that it is a font.

The top line of text is pretty legible and honestly one of the better scrypt typefaces that I have seen in this type of design. It was an even weight and is not overly flowy. The kerning between the “a” and “r” and “are” is a little tight just in the top of the “a”. I feel that is more of an issue with how the font comes stock.

In the word “sunshine” things start to get a lot more off. The two “n”s are so different from each other. The first one in the word fits the rest of the letters much better, whereas the second varies in stroke weight so much that it feels out of place. The repeating letter “s”s also show how odd this typeface is. The first one reads as a “J” and the second looks like a print “s” rather than cursive, but it retains a cursive stroke that goes through the letter, making it look like an “8”.

Though I have been thoroughly enjoying all of the text on the inside of this book, I am going to be taking a deeper look at the typography on the outer covers and spine.

I think that the overall look of this book design is great. The title typefaces are bold and emphasize some pretty extreme buzzwords that would draw a potential reader in. The combination of outlined serifs and sans serifs feels seamless. I believe that “the” in the title is the bold font in the same typeface as the text identifying the author, but because it is utilizing a stroke placed on the outside of the text it is a bit hard to tell. The green text of “virgin suicides” has very high contrast against the pink box, making it feel much heavier than “the” only being strokes. I think that placing “the” and “virgin” to where they were touching, making their strokes blend into each other and creating a merged negative space, may have helped ground these words together and help lend some of the contrast. When I look at the typesetting I do see some discrepancies. On the front cover, the name of the author and the pink box are not aligned in any way. The “s” in “eugenides” does not line up with the top of the box. I think that the kerning could have been adjusted to where the author’s name was the same length as the height of the entire design so that the could be equivalent. When looking at the spine in relations to the front cover, It could have been so easy to make the top of the title and the top of the author’s name line up, especially because the title is not centered between the top and bottom pieces of text.

For Valentine’s Day my fiancee and I went to Fast Eddies to play mini golf and some arcade games and race the go-karts against each other. This is the back of the score sheet for the mini golf and it is a beautiful mess. I counted eight different fonts on it. Without the stylization of the header text, it is pretty bad and my brain reads it as “FUNT ASTIC Mini GOLF”. The kerning between the “t” and “a” is really high, especially because the curved leg of the “a” could easily fit under the crossbar of the “t”. Moving down to the next line I think that the designer was trying to do some sort of a typographical pun by not having “Mini” be in all capitals like the rest of the header, but it would have been more effective and not looked out of place if it was in all lower case. “Mini” was given an especially high amount of bounce to the point where to letters do not even share a common baseline. When using an almost drunken rotation of letters it is important to watch your kerning, as the “M” and “i” are touching. This whimsical effect was handles much more successfully in “GOLF”.

In the second box of text on the left column, the rules list is fine. The bottom two lines of text were seemingly in different cases at first. “Funtastic Golf Experience” was not the name of it anywhere else in the building and it was odd to have it in caps, so I thought that it was in title rather than sentence case.

In the right text box there really is no reason to have two zeros in “$1” and doing so made the layout awkward. “Off” is not centered between the other two pieces of text. The tracking of the small bottom text is pretty high and could have been adjusted to make more room.

This is a pamphlet for an on-ship marine biology research opportunity that my fiancee brought home. On the front cover, which is all the way to the right, there are two typefaces. One is a very clean sans serif with three different fonts shown, and the other is a very electronic looking scrypt. Moving into the informative paragraphs, there is excellent hierarchy. The headers of each section are larger than the bodies, but what really draws the eye in is having a key word in each title be bold. The sub headers utilize all caps and a bold font in the same size as the bodies to denote secondary importance. In a few places, the body paragraphs have bold and italicized words that offer quick information to someone skimming over the pamphlet. Towards the bottom of the page, the very large quotation mark is a really good way of using it as an icon to show where someone is talking about personal experience with this program. This sections also utilities a bold serif to highlight certain phrases in the quote.

The other side of the pamphlet, I do feel, is less strong from a typographical standpoint. The same scrypt typeface from the title page is used here, but when used for a full sentence it starts to get this very unnatural geometric appearance. In each of the words in the second line there are letters that are not connected by the swashes of the previous letter, furthering this disconnect from how it would be handwritten in cursive.

In the circle of text and logos the hierarchy does not read from top to bottom. The bold text showing the website holds more visual weight than “learn more” which is in a larger point size. The logotype for Youtube is used, which does not feel as cohesive with the other social media logos displayed. Simply using the play button would maintain the weight of the others.

Also at Fast Eddies, we won this children’s chalk board that is now on our fridge to leave notes for each other. It is in the genre of dollar store toy package design. There are so many colors and pieces of text going on that it is a very intense and disjointed design.

The hierarchy at the top of the packaging is very confusing. There is no grid system and elements are sporadically set. Due to the intense contrast of the yellow text and its green stroke against the blue background, my eye first goes to “chalk board”. I actually really like this double stroke method of giving a piece of text visual importance. It is also my favorite typeface found in the design. The blue stroke feels more like offset outlines of the text, giving a sense of direction. This same stylization is used for the box of chalk. In both of these two uses the tracking is quite tight and, if matched up with the weight of the blue stroke surrounding the words, could be modified to reinforce the outward moving visual rhythm of the text style. “Scribble” being in blue gives a very low differentiation from the background, and this is furthered by the second of three stokes placed around these words having a gradient that fades to blue, necessitating a white stroke around

At the bottom and sides of the packaging there are various pieces of small text that feel cramped. Comic Sans is used quite liberally. On some of the text a stroke the same color as the background is used to help with contrast, but not on the logo.

My finds for this week were taken from walking through the hallways of the art building. This excerpt from a newspaper discussing Marzia’s work and show in TAG caught my eye because of how non-eye-catching it is. Newspaper design is a much more standardized format than magazine. Headlines, sub-headers, columns of body text, and image captions are about as extreme as it gets. This article is very straight-forward in terms of following the visual information as intended. It is a very transparent design, leading the reader’s eyes through the page without them noticing.

There are a few different typefaces and fonts used for this layout but they are all very similar sans-serifs, maintaining simple consistency. The most avant garde piece of type in the whole design is the “t” in the largest header, with a less traditional half crossbar and swashes at the bottom of the stem. The sub header is a bit more of a condensed bold with relatively large spacing in between each word. This creates a good sense of rhythm. Underneath each of these headers is a smaller italic, with the writer of the article being in a bold italic. Neither of the sub headers inherently need to be italic, but the juxtaposition of a strong, geometric bold and a small italic is very nice.

The body of the article is broken into four columns. Each paragraph is short so the constant indentation makes it easy for the reader to follow and not lose their place. There are a few sentences at the start and end that are in bold. The first gives the context for the article and the second gives the reader information to learn more. They give a very good visual indication of start and stop.

This is a poster for the art honor society weekly meeting. I am so sorry if the person who made this is in this class

There are some general problems with the type setting that I will point out at random as I give a more analytical look at it. It seems like there is a space between “art” and its following comma. That space is much larger than any other place where there is a comma, so I am guessing it is not a kerning issue. That particular comma also touches the word “socializing” in the next line. This leading is a consistent problem. The top group of text appears to be all different text boxes, so the spacing between lines and pieces of text are inconsistent. The kerning between “E” and “T” in “meeting” is super tight, leaving only a pixel of space. The “L“ and “Y“ in “weekly“ are far apart in contrast to the tracking of the rest of the words in this group.

The stars in the background being the same color as some of the text leads to some issues. The lack of contrast creates some moments of tension when stars are either very close or touching letters. This gives the feel of the document being low resolution or that there was a mis-print. It is the most distracting for me on the “s” in “Fridays” where the dot at the top of the letter is just enough for my brain to see it as a dollar sign for a second, and on the “r” in “Printmaking”.

This is the postcard for this year’s Youth Art Focus exhibit at the PMA. I think it is a very effective use of a single typeface with some color and only two font variations to create hierarchy and interest.

There is a color hierarchy that I feel goes, in order of weight, black, purple magenta, blue, pink. This in combination with the use of scale and bolds creates a lot of variation very simply. My eye at first goes to body paragraph in black. This dark cluster of words holds the most visual weight of the typographic design. But because this is such a large amount of visual information my eye goes to the largest header stating the title of the exhibit, which is a much more immediately digestible couple of words. It isn’t until I read the dates of the show that my brain sees that it is the 69th year of this event. I think the reading of more colored numbers makes this an afterthought. After my brain does this weird jumping around I read the rest of the card chronologically. This does not discredit the legibility of the design and it is probably just me. I am able to deduce where all of the information I need is at first glance.

The way that text box dodges the illustrative elements on the left is really well handled. It does lead to the sub header, “Programs”, to not be aligned with its following information but it creates a cool reversed indentation that I feel could be useful in some situations.

As a very odd example of typography I have this poster from the Dreamland roller skating rink. It is a very intense example of laying out words in a very difficult to read and illogical manner. At first it looks like a very dynamic piece of type and then you start to read it and realize how much constant movement there is.

I view this as being structured like a poem. I have a lot of trouble reading this because there are no breaks. I believe that there are thirteen individuals sentences or thoughts included here with no periods, only an exclamation point at the end of the entire passage. Everything runs into each other because it never stops. It being in all capitals definitely plays into this problem because it is another thing masking when new ideas start. There is such an odd use of bold and enlarging certain words that does not necessarily highlight things of importance. The leading is inconsistent in a way that seems intentional for no reason. Things being unevenly spaced and sized creates a really weird hierarchy. If anything the bold words give me a landmark to go back to when I get confused and need to re-read sections. It makes sense to have bold words be larger but when the same font is enlarged to create hierarchy is makes the weight of the letters feel disproportionate. The size or weight changing almost every line does not allow my eyes to settle into the text but rather onto the text.

This is a really nice label for a drink we have at my physically and mentally draining place of employment. We apparently have had three other flavors of Culture Pop that I have never payed attention to until we got this new flavor and the can design was so nice that I drank it. The typographic design is still the same as the other cans but the color and contrast is so good on this one.

The font choices place this in the Americana, gentrification, hipster genre of design. The primary bold font is very friendly. It varies between regular and italic to add emphasis, like in “Strawberry and rhubarb” where “and rhubarb” is in italics like its a sultry little secret. The side of the can with all of the adjectives in red has a cool rhythm to it. The first letter in each word has either an ascender, descender, or both and each last letter of every word is a “y”, creating a very symmetrical composition. It would be interesting to play with the kerning in this to make the line-lengths geometrically equal.

The light font gives off typewriter feel in its punchyness. The tight kerning in the ingredients list really plays into this.