Typographic Design: Form and Communication, 6th Edition

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Case Studies in Typographic Design

The case studies presented in this chapter describe specific typographic design problems encountered in professional practice: integrating type and image on posters, establishing a visual system to unify various materials, translating content to experimental form in publication design, thinking about typography in terms of time and motion, creating dimensional and environmental typography, analyzing and visualizing data, and developing a unique visual language for everyday events. The nature of each concept is analyzed, and the rationale for the solution is discussed, with the aim of showing the complexity of applied problem solving.

CASE STUDY 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 a studio in San Francisco, California. Lévy collaborates with photographers, approaching 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 Years” poster (Fig. 10-1) for the Basel studio AND (Trafic Grafic) conveys a sense of energy and motion through repetition on a diagonal axis. The background transition from orange to ...