EDITORIAL DESIGN :: More Typeface/Layout Inspirations

A few more typeface inspirational ideas for my TYPOGRAPHY SWIPE BOARD:

Herb Lubalin

Kind of like Bodoni, but also looks like ITC Annlie, ITC Firenze, and Carousel.

EDITORIAL DESIGN :: REVISED DEPARTMENT LAYOUTS

EDITORIAL DESIGN :: DEPARTMENTS LAYOUT

Exploring the layout designs for a magazine’s department “Fashion”, one of a few departments that would be part of a magazine about the modern take on 1960s.

EDITORIAL DESIGN :: MOOD BOARD

Trader Joe’s Cool Creatives: Are You Hiring, Please?

I’ve been a big fan of Trader Joe’s store since I’ve first discovered it in California in 2002. But besides the great inexpensive selection of foods they offer, they do incredibly creative design work – the interior/decor design, promo materials, in-store posters and signs.

Here’s a few of their latest, which I adore every time I visit it on the Upper West Side, NYC. A very smart way to re-do the famous Broadway shows into Trader Joe’s themes, don’t you think? Absolutely awesome!

The Many Revisions & Hours Spent On One Logo

As one of my readers pointed out, my Typography class professor has used a very old example of the “Art in America” magazine logo that we had to redesign for the editorial project in the class (see here). However, at this point, it didn’t matter what he used for the ‘original’ logo as it had to be re-designed anyway.

I made a few versions for the new logo, one of which has been chosen and I was working on crafting and finalizing it to perfection for the portfolio showcase.

Here’s how the current logo of the Art in America magazine looks like:

The current logo of the Art in America magazine

Now, scroll down to see what I’ve done to it.

Making The Type Talk: The Wall-E

Don’t you just love guessing the typeface every time you look at some text. Ever since I’ve been studying the typography, I can’t help myself but try to guess the typeface/fonts everywhere I go and/or whatever I look at or read. At some point it starts to drive me crazy, because I do it subconsciously  and then catch myself doing it.

It especially drives me crazy if I can’t guess the font, or, when I see that there’s less diversity in the fonts that the surroundings use.

We had an interesting discussion in one of my typography classes, way back, about the fact that in the beginning of the 20th Century, for example, the business owners (from store owners and first banks to the medical offices and entertainment centers) made an effort to use the HANDMADE typeface.

Art in America: Redesigning The Logo

One of the last projects we are doing in our Typography class has to do with the editorial design, or, to be exact – we have to re-design the Art in America magazine, starting with the logo.

We were told to think about the logo redesign in relationship to how it works on a cover – which makes sense, you can’t put a comedy type font on a magazine like Diabetic Living, right?

Then, after we redesigned the logo, the next part was to design a cover incorporating the new logo, but I’ll talk about it later. Let’s take care of the very first part of the assignment – the logo re-design.

So, the current logo has a relatively ‘modern’ look, and also very clean, very readable, but I wanted to completely redesign the feel of it. I wanted to show that the art in America goes as far as to the beginning of the century. I also wanted to ‘revive’ the fonts that are more ‘old school’, like a hand-writing, something that Louise Fili would be happy about. (Personally, I see more and more of the modern typography and less and less of the art deco types of the fonts.

Here’s what I came up with:

Best Free Font Websites

Tom Violence fonts

Do you ever struggle finding new fonts for your graphic or logo designs, or just for fun projects? Do you know that there are a lot of fonts/types in the graphic programs, like Photoshop and InDesign, that are not real types, but kind of invented for the computer use only and translate no originality or uniqueness of any sort? That is why, more often than we think, the designers go online to search for that one right font for their project, like the one I did for the poster project I talked about in the previous blog I did for the American Life League.

For my anti-abortion poster I chose to use the ‘violent’ font – or, in other words, the font that looks, feels and reads like ‘violence’, which I wanted to use for the world – aborted, see here. Obviously, my first step was to go online and search for it, and I found it here.

Once I saved the ‘table’ of the violent alphabet on my desktop, I then imported it as an image into my Photoshop and cut out and pasted the letters I needed it – one by one into my poster, followed by multiple readjustments and kerning. This was a tedious thing to do and I’m sure there are easier ways to do so. I wouldn’t have to do it if the Photoshop offered a type like that.

But, no matter how many times the Adobe design suite gets revised, there still aren’t many good quality fonts to use and they are missing a lot of very ‘character-based’ font.

This is why many designers – especially those working in the corporate America – end up using the most generic and old-school fonts like Helvetica, Franklin Gothic, Times New Roman, and Interstate, proven over time – the fonts that’s been used over and over and over again.

And this is why designers around the world search out and share the new finds of the fonts with the other designers via online tools and platforms, especially the fonts that are free. Despite the fact that some designers still may shy away from free fonts for aesthetic reasons, they should still consider giving them a shot.

Fonts, Fonts, Fonts! New Free Fonts

Here on my blog you can also find some freebies for your projects. I’m all about the sharing. If I could help to guide, encourage and/or help you with your projects, I will. Sometimes I come across some interesting free stuff to use in design and I’d like to share these great finds with you.

Recently I came across some free fonts, and since fonts, certainly, play an important role in our design projects and because we can never get enough of the fonts (taken that there are a lot of fonts out there that come with a graphic program that are, simply, not usable for many reasons), I’d love to share those that could add je ne sais quoi to your projects.

For example, in one of my recent projects – an anti-abortion poster design, I had to look for the ‘violent’ font, and came across a few good ones, like this one. There are many, many, many fonts out there and if we could pick and choose and share the best of the best with the each other, the design ‘world’ would be so much better!