Typography Assignment

For the typography assignment I decided to make a page using some of the content from my masters thesis. I said last week I wasn’t going to use my thesis for this class, but then I decided that for this assignment it might be kind of fun. I’ll get back to physical culture in the progressive era for the design and final assignments. I pieced together some text from my thesis that introduces a woman named Sylvia Ullback who was a beauty expert to the Hollywood stars in the 1920s. I thought this content would make for a fun design and a creative use of fonts. For this weeks blog post, I thought I’d explain my thought process and justify some of the decisions I made while designing this page.

Before I began the design, I spent some time thinking about old Hollywood, fan magazines, Sylvia, and the tone and feeling that I wanted the page to display. When thinking of old hollywood black and white immediately comes to mind but I wanted to do something a little more exciting in terms of color.

[caption id=«attachment_583» align=«alignleft» width=«150»] This is the article that contains the cartoon used in my typography assignment.[/caption]

I also knew I had a image that I had cut out from one of Sylvia’s articles in _ Modern Screen_ magazine. The is a hand drawn comic strip showing a woman entering Sylvia’s shop, being transformed physically and leaving svelte and thin looking like a new woman. This image was black and white though and I wanted to add some color to the page. I decided to use a background that is a teal color with a slight diagonal stripe to it and have elements of a light reddish color on the page. I wanted the color scheme to be fun and reflect the playful tone in much of Sylvia’s writing (really some of the articles are a great laugh).

For the headings at the very top of my page I decided to go with a classic, but readable script like the ones often used in film title cards. I ended up going with the google font ‘Dancing Script’ after much debate. I wanted to use this font for the beginning of the tile ‘As Lovely as the Stars of» and use a different font for «Hollywood».

[caption id=«attachment_584» align=«alignleft» width=«150»] Typography assignment with the first font[/caption]

I had two fonts that I debated between for the word «Hollywood». The first was font was designed to look like the hollywood sign and had a jagged baseline causing the text to look uneven. As you can see from the screenshot on the left, that quickly turned out to be a bad idea.  The second was a font that had a dotted inner outline and looked very much like the lights you might see on the outside of a movie theater.

[caption id=«attachment_585» align=«alignright» width=«150»] Screenshot of the final font used for the typography assignment[/caption]

I decided that this font fit the feel I was going for and looked good on the page. I played with using this same font for the subheadings and even for the navigation, but quickly decided that the font really only looked good very large and resorted to using a sans-serif for the headings instead.

I’m sure I’ll find more things that need to be fixed on the page over the weekend—but for now it is up on my site. You can view the page here. This week I commented on Jannelle’s Blog.