Typographic Design: Form and Communication, 5th Edition

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Case Studies in Typographic Design

Many of the educational projects in the following chapter represent theoretical and exploratory investigations. They are structured to teach typographic history, theory, spatial concepts, form, and meaning. The goal of typographic education is to prepare young designers for the complexity of applied problem solving. The case studies presented in this chapter describe specific typographic design problems encountered in professional practice. The nature of each problem is analyzed, and the rationale for the solution is discussed.

These eight studies cover a wide range of typographic design problems: integrating type and image on posters, publication designs, environmental typography, branding, Web-site design, and typographic motion-picture titles.

Integrating type and image in poster design

A remarkable integration of type with image is found in posters designed by Jean-Benoît Lévy, who has studios in Basel, Switzerland, and San Francisco, California. Lévy collaborates with photographers; he approaches their images as three-dimensional fields whose space is activated and extended by type. On the last day of class when Lévy was a student, teacher Armin Hofmann told him to place type in the photograph rather than on the photograph. Lévy says, “From that moment on, I knew what to do.” In his inventive designs, words and images become a unified composition.

The large star in a “Happy New Year” poster (Fig. 1) for the Basel studio AND (Trafic Grafic) ...