Chapter 3 and 4 Response

Chapter 3:


Using ones utmost cleverness and wits within the grid of a composition seemed to be what chapter three was calling for. Not clever in the sense of some kind of 'advertising jingle' but in a more modest way. Having ideas that push boundaries of more than simply what the text says, and connecting with an audience that is expecting a sort of aesthetic. Whether it's for a logo, sign, or a simple play on words- everything needs to be well planned with ideas regarding the grid- regarding the size/stroke/height of the text, while also playing the with arrangement of each letter form or line of text and deciding what it's orientation should be like on the page. The forms of lettering compositions are key to projecting a successful end result, obviously. It's really interesting to see all of the forms that can be used to play on words, and end up looking very successful. I really enjoyed the 'conversation' composition, where the questions and answers were playing off eachother on a diagonal line- as it's visually appealing and also quite clever.
I think grids are very interesting to analyze, and once you realize their existence you start to see nearly every piece of graphics laid out in some kind of grid and you can soon start to judge if grids are utilized well or not. A photo I liked a lot was the example of the big 'O' being layed out on the grid, but it wasn't adjusted with the text but the center of the O was placed where the edge of the type starts. I saw it as clever and visually appealing.

Chapter 4:

I love how this chapter covered the 'modern age' of typography and how there's a resurgence of old fonts that are manipulated to look 'edgy' and new fonts that look terrible, and how people blindly use them in their graphics unknowing of how ugly it looks and how it brings down their designs. I thought it was quite interesting how you could read words if they were spliced in the center if you were only reading the top half of the word, unlike the bottom, which is much harder to decipher. The chapter made me never want to use a kind of 'old english' typeface ever again, since a lot of the time the letters do look like others, and ya don't wanna make that mistake shown in where 'DANCER' looks like 'DANGER'. I also probably wont use 'center' justification with paragraphs anymore, since it's now hit me that the awkward spaces between created by the 'centering' are actually really annoying to read through.