ART of typography

by  

Sabeena Karnik

I have always liked words and letter as well as art and design. Here is an example of how both or all can be combined into one piece. These are physical designs using paper to create unique font that is colorful and stylish Times New Roman.

ABC- Black n Red

Cyrus Highsmith

Another alphabet design. This one is in red and black and white. The style is very cartoonish with blocky serifs and inconsistent weight variations. This font reminds me of something you woulds see as the title font for a cartoon on nickolodeon.

ABC - Wood

Sherraine C. Phillips -Jamaica

This is another original alphabet design which has been carvedout of a dark wood and photographed. The letters are tall all caps with consisitent wieght.  A few of the letters connect or created abstract shapes with the negative space. Some of the letters like H and U have extra serifs that are consisitent with the U and the N.  This font is more decrative than practical.

Minimalistic Movie Posters 3 - narration by Morgan Freeman

I came to this Shawshank poster while rummaging through my pins on Pinterest. You could say I'm a man who knows how to get things. When I first came across this poster, I didn't think much of it. To be honest the type was bold, in your face. The red was too red. But then I thought, how ingenious to break up the title like that. I must admit that the title is a mouthful. So breaking the type so that it could read The Shaw-shank Redemp-tion, I think would appeal to people that might have trouble pronoucing things. In the center, is a big hole which represents the whole that Andy dug before he crawled through a tunnel of sewage as long as twelve footbal fields. Or something like that. And also Frank Darabont is awesome because he created the greatest zombie apocolypse TV shows of all time...

Minimalistic Movie Posters 2 - Tracking and leading

This is another mininmalist movie poster for Disney/Marvel's The Avengers movie. The poster features Iron Man and places the actor's name Robert Downey Jr. at the top. This might be misleading because Tony Stark/Iron Man is not exactly the star but it was the Iron Man movie that kicked off the Avengers Initiative. 

Below the mask is a line from the movie, Tony's response to Captain America asking him. "Take off the suit, who are you?" The response is "Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist." The text is spaced out in a dynamic way genius is largest, billionair is the longest word and is scaled down to fit and line up with "genius". "Playboy"'s tracking has been increased and 'philathropist" another big word has been scaled to fit.

Below that is the official Avenger's Logo with the iconic "A." and a blocky bold sci-fi font.

Minimalistic Movie Posters 1 - text on shape

I was looking through some examples of minimalistic posters and found a few that relate to typography. I found these three- there are many more but I found the ones that I thought were interesting or that were films I liked. The formula is an iconic shape and color choice such as Darth Vader's helmet or the red coffee cup for Office Space- actually I think it would be funnier if it was a red stapler with all milton quotes or a white coffee cup with all Lumburgh-isms. The shapes are overlaid with a lot of type which containts familiar lines from the movies. The sizing and spacing in the leading and tracking create a textural image but it comes across as a mess. Some of the designs could use more thought but I thought they were interesting.

Kay Bros

by Armin - Gainesville, FL

One page menu lay out. Simple log of cooking utensils. Dark red type for the menu headings. The off-center style of the menu headings creates a dynamic design. I am working on a similar design for my own menu design.

Another Water Bottle Design

Text gets lost in the bg colors.

Hierarchy

I like this Pan Asia Cuisine menu the red is very bold and appetizing. The photos are clear and helpful. Unfortunately we cannot use photos but the hierarchy is what is important to me. This has effective use of space. the headings for the most part are the same size and same font and color.