Visual Communication Newsletter

#01 Management Asikin Hasan Ibrahim Soetomo Nirwan Dewanto

Documentation Riki Zulkarnain Witjak Widhi Tjahya

Writer Asikin Hasan

Communication

Editor Alpha Hambally Designer Kalistha Kiyasati

Contents Typography ---- 1

Fig 01 - Visual Represenetation

Aesthetics ------ 9

Book Refrence --- 11

Typography

How Typography Impacts Your Mood Physically, we use our voice, facial expressions. gestures and posture to convey a wide range of emotional cues from the subtle to the dramatic. Typefaces and the way they are used provide a similarly extensive emotional range typographically.

Sarah Hyndman Author of ‘Why Fonts Matter’ who makes typography exciting.

Researches type & perception, multi-sensory responses & typefaces as cultural codes.

“ Emotional range typographically “ In 1933 Poffenberger and Barrows explored how shapes and simple as lines could communicate emotions.

Continued on page 2

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Fig 02 Visual representation

“Type also mirrors the way your handwriting communicates your mood or emotions.“

Fig 03 Example of emotions

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Fig 04 Another example

Their theory was that when we look at a line our eyes move along the shape. This turns it into a physical experience that reminds us of the body language we use to express our emotions. They asked participants to match emotions form a line to each of the 18 curved and jagged lines sloping in different directions. A line going downwards was shown to make us feel “doleful,” while a “joyous” like takes our eyes upwards.

Each of our emotions contains a whole range of feelings and these nuances can also be conveyed typographically.

Psychologists Samuel Juni and Julie Gross asked 102 New York University students to read a satirical article from The New York Times. Each was given the reading randomly printed in either Arial or Times New Roman.

Afterwards they were asked to rate their response to what they had read. They rated the article as being funnier and angrier, in other words more satirical, when it was read in Times New Roman.

There is a parallel between what we experience in the physical world and how this influences our interpretation of typeface shapes. Type can be seen as mirroring the emotions we display in the real world through our facial expressions and gestures. When we are happy our faces become round with a wide smile and our body language is open. By contrast, an angry frown expression is pinched and angel and an attacking animal is all jagged teeth and claws.Type also mirrors the way your handwriting communicates your mood or emotions.

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Using Typography to Hack your Brain …and the psychology of why on earth you would make a font hard-to-read A typeface designed to be hardto-read hit headlines in the design world and beyond.

But why would you make a font difficult to read?

It’s unusual, because for the last five and a half centuries developments in printing technology and typeface design have aimed to make words more, and not less, readable.

Today the intention is often to reduce the cognitive load, or the amount of effort the brain needs to put in to understand the message, so that products can be recognised easily in a busy environment, or so instructions can be communicated quickly and easily.

Fig 05 Visual Representation

The quest for legibility Lots of research has focused on legibility, which is much easier to measure than something less tangible like your emotional response to a typeface.

In the 1960s Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir tested road signs by placing them on a car that was driven

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towards a test audience who noted at which point the different styles and sizes could be read. As a result they created a new, highly readable British road and motorway signage system, and this subsequently become a role model for modern road signage all over the world (1).

More recently MIT and type foundry Monotype collaborated on researching how to improve the design and typography of interfaces we read with a “quick glance” (2). They used much more sophisticated (and less nerve-wracking) technology than Calvert and Kinneir as they were able to monitor eye tracking and to measure split-second response times.

Easy-to-read = easy-to-do?

Fig 06 Visual Representation

As well as making signage clearer, it’s been shown that an easy-to-read typeface might convince your brain that the task you’re reading about might be easier to do (3). If information is easier to process and the effort required by the brain to understand it is reduced, you will instinctively assume that the actual task you’re reading about will therefore be easier to do.

This ranges from building a DIY wardrobe to encouraging people to exercise. For example psychologists at the University of Michigan showed that a group of 20-year-old college students were more motivated to exercise regularly when they read the written instructions for an exercise routine in an easy-to-read typeface, than those who read it in a harder-to-read style. Both groups read exactly the same instructions; the only thing that changed was the font. In the easy-to-read style they estimated the routine would take 8.2 minutes to complete, compared with the 15.1 minutes estimated by those who read them in the brush style Mistral. The ‘easy to read’ group were more willing to incorporate the regime into their daily routine and the ‘hard to read’ group thought it would drag on.

“If information is easier to process and the effort required by the brain to understand it is reduce”

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Why would you want to make a typeface hard-to-read?

Question: how many animals of each species did Moses take on the Ark? Consumer neuroscientist Dr David Lewis finds that when he poses this question in an easy-to-read typeface like Arial around 80% of people get the answer wrong, however when it’s posed in a harder-to-read typeface like Brush Script the number who get it wrong goes down to around 50%. I get a similar response when I try this experiment in my workshops (of course when you think about it you remember it was Noah who led the animals into the Ark, not Moses) (4).

Lewis finds that when words are harder-to-process you have to pay more attention to reading them, and as a result you’re taken off autopilot and become more aware of what the words actually say. This can be really useful if you want to remember something. Lewis says that making something unfamiliar and harder-to-read means you’re “obliged to invest greater time and attention in deciphering the words”. A high school in Ohio discovered that when students studied from texts in an unfamiliar font, their exam results were higher than those students who had been given the books in a more familiar and readable one.

“words are harder-to-process you have to pay more attention to reading them”

Fig 07 Visual Representation

Sans Forgetica font

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#01 To put the theory into practice, designers and psychologists at Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) collaborated on a project to design a hard-toread font. They named the resulting font Sans Forgetica, which is fun because it is a take on one of the two main classifications of typefaces: Serifs (letters with ‘feet’ on the terminals, these were the first printed Roman letters) and Sans serifs (without serifs). Sans Forgetica means “without forgetting”.

Sans Forgetica is a typeface that has been designed with features in it such as back-slanting and little gaps inside the letters. AIGA’s Angela Riechers describes it as “an alphabet that’s forgotten how to behave.

Humans learn quickly However, I think that an unusual typeface like Sans Forgetica will only work if it’s used sparingly to highlight key words or phrases to be remembered. It works a little like speed bumps or road markings that slow you down because it’s important for you to pay more attention when driving through a particularly hazardous section.

But humans learn quickly, and with a bit of practice you’ll become adept at reading what was initially a new and unfamiliar style, like breaking a code or learning a new language. Some proof? Dense Gothic Textura Blackletter was the style of the day when printing came to Europe in the 15th century. Familiarity made this easy-to-read at the time, although it’s hard for our modern eye to decipher.

When sans serifs were first printed in the early 1800s they were considered far too ugly for comfortable reading (printers even named them “grotesques”), and it took over a century before they would become familiar enough to be popular.

“highlight key words or phrases to be remembered”

Fig 08 Visual Representation

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The future New and exciting technology is being developed that will enable a single font to morph and change shape fluidly.

These are called variable fonts and they’re causing a lot of excitement in the typeface world.

By combining easy-to-read and hard-to-read typeface theories with the new variable font technology, words could be designed to keep you on your toes by constantly evolving as you read them. As the unfamiliar becomes easy enough to read for your word-per-minute rate to increase (potentially the camera in your reading device could be tracking your eye movements), the font could morph into new and unfamiliar shapes designed to slow your reading rate right back down again.

“As the unfamiliar becomes easy enough to read”

Do it yourself You can try making written information more memorable for yourself by downloading the Sans Forgetica font here and trying it out. Or you could experiment with different fonts and treatments to help you remember those pesky elusive facts.

1. Familiarity Since the easiest typefaces to read are the ones we are most familiar with, type designer Zuzanna Licko says “we read best what we read most”, then how about mixing and matching fonts? Try highlighting small sections in something that’s a little more difficult to read than your go-to font, or a font you hate enough that it screams at you to pay attention to it. Early on in my design career I was given the advice to proofread in an unfamiliar typeface because it makes it easier to spot the errors.

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2. Distorting Ugly typefaces have also been proven to be more memorable, so you could try something like committing the ultimate sin of squishing a font horizontally, or using ultra-condensed styles. Only make the words or phrases you want to remember more difficult than the rest of the words on the page. In a Type Tasting survey participants were asked which wardrobe would be hardest to build, over 80% chose the highly condensed style.

However, don’t forget that the effect relies on difference, so you’ll need to keep mixing it up. And you’ll likely prefer to revert to more conventional type styles before sending your document on to anybody else for them to read.

“Ugly typefaces have also been proven to be more memorable”

Fig 09 Visual Representation

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Aesthetics

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Excerpt from The Power of Mimesis and the Mimesis of Power: Plato’s concept of Imitation and His Judgment on the Value of Poetry and the Arts.

INTRODUCTION Santiago Juan-Navarro | Florida International University (USA) Plato belongs to a mimetic tradition that considers art as a copy or imitation of the natural world. The main concern of this tradition is the study of the relationship between art and nature.

Plato’s theses must be understood within the corpus of his idealistic philosophy.

For the Athenian, reality was not to be found in the world of the objects but in the realm of the «Ideas» or «Forms». Plato developed an idealistic doctrine which opposed the permanent ambit of the eternal forms to the mutability of the material world. In this context the artist’s goal would be the reproduction of the universe of appearances that we perceive through our senses. Access to the superior realm of the Ideas is the exclusive privilege of the philosopher. The artist is simply an imitator of imitators.

Plato’s concept of imitation, however, is alterable; nor are his judgments upon the value of poetry and the arts unchanging.

If we restrict ourselves to the chronology of his dialogues about the topic (Ion and the Books II, III, and X in The Republic) we note a progression toward an increasingly dogmatic and intolerant position regarding artistic creation, leading to his final rejection of the imitative arts in Book X3. The paradoxes and contradictions that follow from Plato’s opinions on art have led to constant manipulation of his ideas, interfering with an unbiased reading of the dialogues.

“his idealistic philosophy.”

-1. M.H. Abrams (1953) distinguishes four basic orientations in the history of literary criticism: the mimetic, the pragmatic, the expressive, and the objective. In mimetic- oriented criticism «the poem is considered an imitation, a representation, or a copy».

Although in Plato’s dialogues this notion of mimesis has a derogatory connotation, it gave rise to a current in criticism intimately associated with philosophical idealism. Generally speaking, «this group of critics regard external objects as a world of mere appearances, of dead matter, to be brought to life only by the mythopoeic power of the philosopher poet» (Selden 1988: 9). Among the authors belonging to the mimetic tradition Adams points to: Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Philostratus, Caltesvetro, Sidney, Mazzoni, Bacon, Hobbes, Corneille, Dryden, Boileau, Pope, Johnson, J. Reynolds, Kant, Schelling, Bradley, Tate, Stevens, Cassier, Vivas, Crane, and Gombrich.

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Book Refrence

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Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 6th Edition “The latest key developments in web, multimedia, and interactive design” Meggs’ History of Graphic Design is the industry’s unparalleled, award-winning reference. With over 1,400 high-quality images throughout, this visually stunning text guides you through a saga of artistic innovators, breakthrough technologies, and groundbreaking developments that define the graphic design field. The initial publication of this book was heralded as a publishing landmark, and author Philip B. Meggs is credited with significantly shaping the academic field of graphic design.

Meggs presents compelling, comprehensive information enclosed in an

Philip B. Meggs, Alston W. Purvis ISBN: 978-1-119-13623-1 May 2016 704 Pages

DESCRIPTION The bestselling graphic design reference, updated for the digital age exquisite visual format. The text includes classic topics such as the invention of writing and alphabets, the origins of printing and typography, and the advent of postmodern design. This new sixth edition has also been updated to provide: The latest key developments in web, multimedia, and interactive design Expanded coverage of design in Asia and the Middle East Emerging design trends and technologies Timelines framed in a broader historical context to help you better understand the evolution of contemporary graphic design Extensive ancillary materials including an instruc-

tor’s manual, expanded image identification banks, flashcards, and quizzes You can’t master a field without knowing the history. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design presents an all-inclusive, visually spectacular arrangement of graphic design knowledge for students and professionals. Learn the milestones, developments, and pioneers of the trade so that you can shape the future.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR The late Philip B. Meggs is an inductee into the Art Directors Hall of Fame and received its Educator’s Award for lifetime achievement. A former contributing editor to Print magazine, he authored more than a dozen books and 150 articles and papers on design and typography.

Fig 10 Meggs’ History of Graphic Design Book

Alston W. Purvis is Professor of Visual Arts at the Boston University College of Fine Arts where he serves as Chair of the Department of Graphic Design. He is author and co-author of numerous books on graphic design history.

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