Typography

I've had some time to think it over now and I guess there were little tidbits of information that were more important the more I thought on it. You don't really realize the value of something until it is no longer around. With the lesson passed I was hard pressed to continue thinking about the project and the assignment and all the things I had worked on. Even now it is hard for me to think of specifics. In my next and final post I will provide a few examples of the project that I worked on, though it isn't really anything to behold to the regular eye. We left it unfleshed and incomplete, many pieces of it still in the works. The finer details of the assignment gone with the wind, I suppose.

And yet, there are typographical things to be learned. For instance, have any of you heard of the Golden Rectangle? Apparently it's pretty important in the design world. It's said to be something of a 'perfect' shape, though nothing is perfect. To be honest, the truth is that it's the most visually appealing shape in history. The rectangle has side lengths that are part of the golden ratio: 1:1.618. It was used to build the Parthenon and paint the Mona Lisa.

You have to find the sort of... perfect shape to pull the layouts together and that's the difficult bit. That could take days depending on where the assignment needs to go, who is going to look at it... so on and so forth. I never realized all the thought that needs to go into one singular design process. We must think for the common man. Does the common man want to fool around with computer settings to see what he is looking at? Is he going to print it out, should we consider standard printing sizes? Is it to be printed ourselves made special in some kind of 4x9 brochure format?

And once you think you've sorted out one detail, you stumble upon another: the content. Are their images, copy? Does it need to be retrieved, do you need to write it yourself, if so what needs to go in it, so on and so forth. When at last, you think you have found a layout with which you are satisfied, you must begin to think of the finer details. You have created a barebone layout with only dummy copy, but will the real copy hold up so well in your format? So you try something, you try something extreme, and it looks awful.

Everything has to be changed and adjusted. The littlest things are what matters, and what help a project stand out. Thinking about these things over time made me realize the importance of what I truly learned. It was in the subtle hints and details that I took for granted. And I learned: nothing in design or the art world in general can be taken for granted.