The Typographic Route

Following on from my previous post where I decided to take the typographic route for my designs, I decided to start researching recent typographic trends in order to gather a better picture of how my work will fit into the modern place.

While researching I came across an interesting article referring to 'The Average Font' which, in its broadest terms, is an experimental typeface which utilises a wide number of types overlayed each other to create a an averaged out type.
http://iotic.com/averia/
The concept and idea behind such an experiment is strong but its uses in everyday is not. Therefore I started looking into other trends which have a greater impact on the overall market and field of typography.

The results of my 'mass Blog search' are shown below:

Designs which utilised narrow/condensed, bold and large display fonts kept creeping up, although most of these were web based designs, they could still transfer to poster design.

Although hand rendered typography isn't a new trend, it is still relatively popular. The designs have a certain charm and characteristic about them which cannot be matched by the likes of Helvetica and Futura.

Hand rendered type is best used on packaging and may not transfer well to print based.

Every year logolounge.com have a round-up of the latest logo trends, this year was no different:

http://www.logolounge.com/article.asp?aid=lnPf
This is an extremely useful too which also lets you compare the trends from previous years.

This year has seen the rise of:

• Gradients
• Characters/personification
• Visual Vibration
• Non-elliptical circles
• Earth
• Mono-line
• Series of logos
• The colour brown
• Concentric
• Loopy line
• Banded
• Comma shape
• Tan-grams
• Fruit

The idea of having a number of different logos is an appealing one. It lets you expand and diversify your logo across a range of mediums while still retaining some recognisability. 

What is White space?

Inspiration for my 'white space' concept

After watching this video I have decided to follow a largely typographic approach to the work, utilising white space and text to convey the ideas. This is mainly down to the fact that typography can be used to effectively get the message across while also being informative and eye catching.

Audience Research

In order to have a clearer understanding of my possible audience I created a free survey using the surveymonkey.com tool. This allowed me to ask up to 10 questions on the subject of my choice.
There were 34 respondents  to this survey, 44.1% of which do no currently study at this University
The results for some of the questions are detailed below:

As you can see 10 respondents did not answer the above 2 questions, these 10 were in the first set of respondents I asked. So after I realised people were skipping questions I changed the survey so every question was required, this improves the accuracy of results.


Question 6 shows that people are aware of the importance of marketing which sets up the next 2 questions nicely

The next 2 questions focused on the idea of working alongside students to create a business identity.

The majority of respondents agreed they would happily work alongside a student to market their idea effectively.
And surprisingly 91.7% of these respondents would pay a student to work with them. And although the DAC is a free resource for everyone to use it's always interesting to know that people would also be happy to pay for the service.

Coincidently the same number of people who would work alongside students would also pay for such a service.



As Survey monkey is a paid service the free trial only allows you to ask up to 10 questions which isn't enough to generate a perfect picture of  the target audience but allows me to see who the majority is. I addition due to the fact questions could be skipped, only 24 of the 34 respondents actually completed the questionnaire.

Logos/Logotype

Logos and logotypes
A logotype would generally be more suitable if 'Digital Arts Centre' is shortened to the commonplace abbreviation DAC, I think this would best work in a style similar to the blueprint logo below

Creative Work

5 Inspiring Poster Design

For the main brief we need to create a logo, poster, leaflet and a printed campaign extension. I have started my research by looking into poster design.. (Click images to enlarge)

The poster below uses a simple colour scheme which works well. The main graphic used grabs your attention and leads you eyes around the poster, Information is minimalist but functional and informative.

The second example also uses a simple colour scheme utilizing the natural white space around the letters to grab your attention, it's a very effective design which portrays the information well.

This poster caught my attention due to the grunge effect used on the image. I think this dark shading is what sets this poster apart, without it, it's a generic piece of design with no real impact (Generic referring to the red/white/black style used widely)

This is an interesting concept executed quite well, the simplicity of the poster sets it apart coupled with a nice graphic style in the image