Taking Type for Granted

If this article and general topic of discussion showed me anything, it’s that I never paid much attention to fonts. We’ve all been socially-constructed now via internet culture to hate Comic Sans but past that, I’m not sure I ever paid it much mind.

Looking at these two photos, however, I can certainly see a stark difference. There is a certain element lost, and I think the “Font Wars” article summed it up nicely: the new font looks cheap. I’m only 21 and from a suburb with the closest IKEA being the one in Atlantic Station. I had never heard of IKEA before coming to college in 2011. At that point, the new font was securely fashioned in its design. But I can’t help but wonder if my impressions would be different otherwise. The article spoke of IKEA as the pinnacle of design, and I’ve never seen it that way. IKEA to me has always been the college kid’s destination of desperation. Pottery Barn is well out of my reach for quite some time, and maybe forever, so IKEA it is. I’ve labored over an IKEA bookshelf and bed frame and now I live right across from it. A look out of my window during any given daylight hour shows me countless shoppers leaving with cheap but trendy furniture and the IKEA logo stares through at me like the eye of Mordor. The color scheme and the typeface are entirely recognizable, but I certainly agree that it sells an image of cheapness, not classy accessibility as I believe is likely their aim as a company.

I always thought that Twitter had a particularly appealing font and logo for the brand it is selling.

The font has that classic social media vibe–hip, current, but still somewhat professional. The color is an appealing, soft blue and the bird logo is memorable and charming. Overall, setting eyes on this font and overall logo helps Twitter sell itself and also differentiates itself in an effective way from anything else on the market.

 

The NIKE logo accomplishes similar goals with very different tactics. The swoosh is what NIKE is best known for, but the font is similarly powerful. It’s classic, angled, and bold. NIKE is a brand of athletic power. Renowned as the best sports materials brand on the market, it needs a font that expresses that level of power. With the four-letter title, it mirrors the goals of IKEA. Bold, inviting, and memorable are the accomplished goals of these types of fonts.

And we all know this one. Entirely different from IKEA, Twitter, or NIKE, this font expresses the entire premise of a restaurant like Chick-fil-A. This font just screams southern charm and good times. It speaks for itself.

 

Font is important. It’s the centerpiece of your logo. Next to color, it’s the most important aspect of your brand. You know who else really nailed it?

WordPress. This site is beautiful!

Bad flyer

Since January 2013, I have interned with the Public Relations Coordinator for the Honors College. Through this placement, I’ve had the opportunity to learn a lot about effective marketing and advertising. She has taught me some basic Photoshop skills and some need-to-know basics when pertaining to flyers. I’ve even had the chance to make some of my own.

This particular flyer is from the Department of African-American Studies. The content itself is not so bad. Their language and amount of text is perfectly acceptable. It’s the other schematic elements that beg to be addressed.

First of all, this is a Georgia State University flyer. Our color and type guide dictates certain standards for marketing in general. These colors were weak attempts to mimic “GSU Blue” and the other colors expressed in the guide. Further, they completely abandon Gil Sans in favor of fonts that I would argue look cheap and a little childish.

Secondly, the excessive use of punctuation in the title already veers any onlookers from the direction of potentially taking the message seriously. The art of several exclamation and question marks is one usually implemented for elementary audiences… like maybe a flyer for a group of third graders. It serves a purpose in placing emphasis but it doesn’t serve the audience in this case.

Finally, a true mark of rudimentary graphic design is centering everything–which this flyer does. The layout of the page is difficult to read and look at in general.

It’s an unfortunate design fluke because the message and the event itself seem really valuable, but this value is lost in the midst of the design itself.