511-Design Blog: Week 7 - Brockmann, Tschichold...who????

This week our lecture was all about web typography and the hero's of type design. We had a look at designers such as Josef Muller-Brockmann, Jan Tschichold, Khoi Vinh and Jason Santa Maria.

To the horror of Chris and Nick, not many people were familiar with these designers typography, including myself. Knowing one is better than knowing none and I can say that I have heard of Jason Santa Maria (vaguely). So, I took a bit of a break from all things Pop Art, and on the advice of Chris, I looked up these designers using 'the' Google (as the Standardista's like to call it) to learn a bit more about them and their work. Below are my favourite pick of the bunch...

Josef Muller-Brockmann:

Swiss graphic designer
Best known for his simple designs, clean use of typography and the use of grids to structure a web page. >About the Grid System

This is a piece of Brockmann's work that we were shown in class. After researching Brockmann, I can understand why the Standardista's chose him as one of their typography hero's. In my opinion, a grid would be used to format a page in an obvious visual way. I hear grid, I automatically see block columns, formatted text, stiff rigid design, nothing particularly exciting. I would never have visualised a grid could aid the design of a poster/web page in such a creative way as Brockmann managed to achieve. I really like how he has used shapes and colours to create a fluid design which I wouldn't have thought possible when using a grid. I would like to learn more about the Grid System and work on a creative experiment using the techniques to see if I can design a creative yet structured piece of work as these are the aesthetic characteristics I would like to achieve in my Major Project.

Jason Santa Maria:

Graphic designer and founder of design studio Mighty, creative director of Typekit and A List Apart magazine.

I chose Santa Maria as a favourite of the bunch because he creates appealing and accessible web/printed pages using simple/classic type faces as well as a mix of new and creative ones. While browsing his website I came across the link for Typekit. I love this website. During the lecture Chris and Nick through out a few suggestions regarding websites we could obtain fonts from. These included Font Face, Font Shop (which Santa Maria also rates highly), Font Deck, Font Squirrel and Google Font Directory. It doesn't cost a lot to sign up and start benefiting from all of the goodies and Typekit also provides a free trail. The only downside to this is that the goodies are then limited.This site is great for both web banner and content fonts and I will definitely been browsing through it to find a font I'd like to use for my website.

When I was thinking of all the different features of Pop Art (Ben-day-dots being one of them) I came up with the name for my site, pop-it.com. Creative, memorable branding is key to the success of any website, magazine, clothing range etc so I want the design of the logo to be just as impressionable as the name.

I have to say I'm a fan of freebie sites such as urbanfonts and dafont.com. I found a few fonts that I think would look great and tie in with the theme of the site. I picked a few that resembled a comic book style, in particular the font used in Licthenstein's word paintings such as 'Whaam' and 'Varoom' . I also searched for 'dotted' styles that might resemble Ben-Day-dots. Over the next week I hope to tie up the typography side of things and decide on a font for the logo/header and a font for the main text. These are a few of my favourites for the logo.