Software used:
Software used:
Branding & Identity:
Branding & Identity:
City Typography:
City Typography was a project where I designed page spreads for a book, hypothetically published by Unit Editions, around "City Typography"; a text made up of two articles on typography's place and its influence on urban areas. "The Subliminal Power of City Fonts" by Ellie Violet Bramley and "Typography of Place: how Fonts Shape a City's Identity" by Giovanna Fabiano both discuss the importance of typography to a city's identity, and how it influences the society of that place.
For example, Helvetica is known for its use in the city's subway systems, and because of the amount of people who see the font in this setting, that's what it's known for and subliminally recognised because-of. These two articles within the City Typography text identify this and discuss the topic in further detail.
Shown are some pages from initial research for the project, looking into Helvetica's use in NYC as a case-study. After researching into urban typography, I came to the conclusion that typography tends to be most prominent when it's used within transit systems - this is how people remember these typefaces. Signage, maps; these are the things that people spend a significant amount of time looking at, and therefore subliminally recognise these typefaces when they're seen elsewhere. This is what makes a typeface part of a city's identity.
From this idea of transit systems, I then looked into ways that these systems visualise movement and direction within their deliverables (maps, signage, etc), which were then carried through to my initial ideas and my layout sketches.
Utilising the idea of visualising movement and direction, I experimented with stretching the typography using Adobe Photoshop. As the two articles discuss typography, I wanted the type to be the primary visual for my outcome.
I used the typeface Din, as the shape of the letterforms consist of long, straight strokes, and the rounded corners make it easy to split the corners from strokes to then extend the strokes, as I've done so within my designs.
To further visualise this aspect of movement, I created a short typographic animation in Adobe After Effects. The animation shows similar lines that you'd see on a city's transit system's map and signage, travelling across and coming together into the title of the text.
These extended letterforms became the primary visual for my editorial outcome. I utilised colour within the stretched typography to further link it to the graphics around city transit systems, picking out common colours across a variety of urban transit systems. All transit systems follow a similar style of using bright colours for the lines that show different paths and directions, making it easier for people to identify different routes. I took these common bright colours (red, blue, yellow, green, purple, pink, brown and grey) and applied them to the stretched letterforms.
In combination with this, a lot of the stretched letters extend over from one page onto the next, further working to visualise movement and taking the reader from one page to the next, as a transit system would take a person from one location to the next. Additionally, where various lines cross over, a black-outlined circle is placed, as an intersection or overlap of lines would be shown on a transit system's map.
The designs also utilises photographic imagery to push the designs that one step further. I used monochrome imagery, to bring more attention to the coloured lines and letterforms.
After creating and refining the stretched type elements in Adobe Photoshop, I used Adobe InDesign to collate the imagery and stretched type assets with the body copy of the articles, finalising my outcome.