This week in class I learned about typography for screen. One of the first things I learned about was how typefaces can add character. This seems very obvious but this is something I had never covered in previous education. Typography can add character to branding which choosing the right font can convey what you want to talk about or suggest what the brand is about.
Typefaces can have character or tell a story to the viewer. An example we looked at was a video by the BBC which covered how they designed their typeface and the reasons behind it. The main thing I took from the video was to make font functional for everyone such as for people with dyslexia by making each letter and number distinguishable. Something we spoke about was that BBC originally used licenced fonts which costed them millions by clicks and views per month which is why they designed their own font. BBC having their own font allows the user to understand ‘this is BBC’. All the font is the same and works the same.
Different typefaces give different tones of voice, for example a warning sign should be bold to ‘shout’ at the user, which we are used to seeing warning signs as bold as they are so important and need to be eye catching.
It is so important to pick the right font for the content with a matching body text which is easy to read with title text being harder to read, but stands out. To practice this I followed the lecturers demonstration of the ‘Frankenstein’ task which I first copied the provided text into Figma. Then I had to read at the text provided and come up with a list of keywords to describe the text. This was important so the reader would have a certain feeling when reading the text. Rather than working on trust and reliability like a brand, for Frankenstein I would plan to use ‘horror’ serif fonts. My lecturer showed some research I thought was interesting to look at how newspapers etc looked at the time of Frankenstein being written (1816) which was something I would have not thought off, but I will bring on board in the future for research. Some keywords I thought of included, horror, scientist, zombie, alone, monster, vintage, cold, stitches, electric, mortality.
We looked at some visual reference for Frankenstein such as posters and covers. This gave a better understanding of what colours and typefaces are common among the theme of Frankenstein. Looking at the visual references I identified the two common themes was for the typeface which included bold blocky text and serif typeface. Two of the main colours used for Frankenstein is red and green which would be used if we were to design the book cover.
I then had to search for a fitting typeface to use for the base typeface. A base typeface is used for anything which is not a heading so it has to be easy to read, but links to the heading typeface. For this task I decided to go for a serif typeface as I already established this was a common theme for Frankenstein and serif fits well with the time zone the book was written (1816).
I have always found google fonts the best place to find and download fonts if using for web building. I like the ability to type whatever word or sentence to preview it in different fonts. Google fonts also uses a good filtering system which really helps the user to find specific font types.