Typography Critique Week 1 - One Weight, One Pt. Size - Designing with Limitations

hi everybody welcome to the future academy channel today we're going to be talking about typography it's one of my most favorite things to talk about because it's the foundation of all good graphic design and joining me today live are my two cohorts mark contreras and jonah who are calling in remotely managing this hey mark what's up hello what's got vanessa everybody welcome to the future academy channel today we're going to be talking about typography it's one of my most favorite things to talk about sorry about that guys did you guys hear that i heard it no okay that sucked let me close that window i want to chat with people but i'm not going to do it now turning off everything okay all right so uh jonah how's it going holding down the ford at the office here and just in case you guys are wondering what the heck's going on everybody has been allowed to work from home and courage do so some people feel like the office is a better place to be and safer place to be than their apartment with their friends um so that's what's happening joan is in the conference room jonah sure am looking a little dark yes sir me and all my friends over here you have your one fan my one fan number one fan okay we're joined today by a whole bunch of people can we get a group shot here yeah there you go there we are everybody just wave and say hello yay all right we see a lot of familiar faces people have been on the channel before and we're gonna get going so we're gonna jump into the typography critique and today i'll be using adobe illustrator and hopefully i'll be using it correctly we'll see and you guys are all very smart so if you see something i'm doing that isn't right you guys let me know now in case you were wondering what the heck this is and how you get how you participate in part of this essentially everybody who's purchased this course and who's interested in submitting their work uh there's the topography one course here and like all our products during this tough time everything has been discounted so if you guys enroll in the class you could submit your work we're going to try this thing out our plan is to do this for seven weeks but if it doesn't work out that way well we tried and we know that there's a lot of people out there who are stuck at home obviously for for very good reasons and want to learn and so we're trying to set the bar to kind of show how other teachers or or collaborators can work together can have a conversation remotely safely and it could be just as good as the real thing now before we get started i want to talk to everybody about how to do this on your own obviously there are a lot of people who haven't taken our course who want to get better at designing typography so i put together a five-point self-critique checklist for you okay and it's part of the course but just to quickly go over it when you're doing your design work especially when it comes to type you want to pick one focal point you're going to hear me talk about this over and over again what am i supposed to look at you as the designer you're supposed to control that experience for the reader and say hey this is important and you can see that it's subjective because each designer can pick something that they think is more important than something else and i'm okay with that but we need to make a decision pick one thing so every time we come upon a layout and you see too many things that we're looking at you're going to start to think oh we have to reduce this and we we can there's a lot of design techniques that you can that you can use to help draw the eye towards one thing next is you want to think about order what am i supposed to read first second and third the primary secondary and tertiary read as many people have referred to this in the designer art world so think about the order and how it flows now at least in the united states in america we read from the top left corner we read from left to right top to bottom just remember that left to right top to bottom and i'm sure there's going to be a bunch of layouts where it's going to be a little confusing because i don't know what to read next now if you follow all the rules and all the rules we've laid out you're going to create something that feels really solid but it's going to lack a little something extra that element of surprise the unexpected so typography is about repetition and contrast so repetition is the order contrast is the element of surprise in in the world of cooking it might be you're eating something that's like a soup but then there's a little bit of a crunchy thing like deep fried onions that are thrown on top that's a little element of surprise so the soup is wonderful but that little crunch has good mouth feel that's what we're looking for in the designs number four is negative space that a lot of designs tend to crowd everything on the page and give us no room to breathe and i'm going to show you one very simple super like after i showed you you're like why didn't i do that well this is what this is about it's a learning opportunity for all of us just make sure you have some negative space to let your design breathe and the last thing that you do is you check for the details were there any typos did everything line up correctly is something off by two or three pixels so we do this in this order one through five we don't start with the details because overall if we don't have a strong focal point if there isn't a clear read if they're not elements of surprise and enough breathing space the details at that point don't matter we work in this way all right now i'm going to jump around and i'm going to pick somebody who we're supposed to go with first um tom francisconi tom okay so here's tom's work here so this is tom hopefully i spelt your name right tom so is tom's online with us right now we've asked everybody to submit three layouts now theoretically for your homework you're supposed to do 10 and you picked your best three so let's get right into it okay and i'm navigating um using the keyboard shortcuts and if i move too quickly somebody just let me know what's going on so the first thing i want to do is look at the layout and you're going to get an impression like does this feel right does it feel like it it can breathe is there a focal point all that kind of stuff so looking at this layout here it's clearly that he's pulled out design and i see that right there let me pull up my layers palette here okay so there's a lot extra going on here okay we'll lock the foreground element here so he's pulled that design so that's very clear that he wants us to look at this and we're going to read from top to bottom left to right so this is the next thing that we're looking at right here is the journal for graphic design i think this is an overall very clean layout it's very easy to uh to read and to look at and i think by orienting everything on a 90 degree angle like this here he's further separating why can i select this there we go he's further separating this group from this group i like it and if some of you guys don't know what we're doing today they were all given a set of words to work with you must use all of it you can use more of it meaning you could duplicate it but you can't use less than that you can't just arbitrarily delete information and we're allowed to use helvetica and we're only allowed to use one point size and one weight so let's look at what point size this is is eight point type okay all right and he's using covetica new neue regular all right i think that's pretty cool very successful layout tom there's not much i would change on this i think it's really nice there's one little thing that bothers me just a little bit i'm not sure if i can improve it but let's try and a lot of design and especially while we're learning is to try something and if we do something that doesn't work we just hit undo so what i'd like to do is move it down a little bit and see if this helps it or not and what i'm bothered by is this i'm going to draw a little box here and again the objective here is so that you can learn to break down things and see yeah so right now you can see that the margins between the vertical and the horizontal are a little bit different we can make them the same or not but what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you something okay i'm going to take this sorry this entire grouping here i'm going to try to move it up and take a look at it and i'm going to also move it down so through the extremities we start to learn what works and what doesn't work okay so i want you to try that and you could also try pushing it over to the right as well to see if that improves your layout does increasing the amount of let me get my brush here where are my brushes i had this all set up okay so i'm going to get my brushes oh that was a different one okay that's right this is my composite file if we increase this space here and decrease this space here we can create more interesting and dynamic contrast between the two what you what you want to try to generally avoid is things being even so if i take this and move it back here you'll start to see that proportionately the amount of space here is going to be similar to the amount of space here and you may not recognize this kind of in your eye but you feel it as you look at the design so that's what i want to do i want to push things around and see if i can improve it this is a very good layout tom i think you did a great job this is i'm just walking you through things that you can try on your own okay to push things around okay these two layouts are a little less successful for me and there's a couple things i want you to try here because i see that you're using this grouping here did you increase it let's say one two three four yeah you did okay now in this one it's a little harder for me to figure out what you want me to look at and before i told you guys about your the tools that you can use despite us being limited to one point size and one weight there's still a lot that we can use through spacing and repetition and i'll tell you what i mean first i'm going to hide this okay i'll hide that which is command three if we took this and we brought it closer proximity communicates like grouping like these things belong together right but if i were to take this and move it farther away you're going to start to see like they're still grouped in a way that they align to this access right here they line here right i have to not sure i don't want to do that okay they align here but by pushing it farther away i make it so that you can't ignore this one element so now this becomes the clear focal point that's read number one this would be the second read and then this down here would be the third read we have to still contend with um with this group so the problem i have with this layout let me undo everything here the problem i have with this layout right now is that these things don't seem to be connected to this at all it's almost like two families like there's the family the johnsons over here and then the smiths over here and in design you want to try to bring these things together well how can you do that well you can try by bringing some of this on the same axis over here like pretend that that lined up there that makes a different kind of layout a different feeling there's other things that you can do perhaps you could try pulling this over to the right and getting this to line up but you want to you want to have some kind of relationship between these things otherwise they feel they're in completely different universes okay and the last one here oh you know what you may have the old assignment here tom because the new assignment is is resonate right so we we we modified the assignment just a little bit so in case you're doing this and you're going to participate with us every single week do your best to use the new type okay it's it's designed to help make the type setting easier for you originally i gave this assignment to use this exact amount of copy but i found that people were struggling with it so i made it a little bit easier so take a look at that okay overall nice job tom i'm going to close this file here all right do we have somebody else that we have to talk about next nope whoever you want to select next oh my computer's freaking out now it just was waking up all right so let me try this person here okay this is uh in a riddick i'm sorry if i butchered that i know i butchered it and these are the three things that you submitted i can already tell right now you should use a template that we provided to you because everybody did their files look like this it is important for you to look at it like this versus the way that you did it okay oops now i'm going the wrong direction ah i've lost it sorry guys is it this one yeah or we're back here i wanted to really focus on this layout in particular here i think there's some really interesting things going on now i'm pulling out layouts not because they're good or they're bad but because there's something for me to talk about so just because i pick on your work it doesn't mean that i hate it or i love it it's just a learning opportunity for all of us okay what i like about this layout there's some problems here uh is that you're using a much bigger point size and you're also using the oblique oblique weight here i believe yeah helvetica new neue bold italic okay um it's actually oblique not italic but that's kind of interesting okay anyways it's okay for things to cut off the edges the way you've done and i want to encourage everybody that's designing to to respect the edges but then also push beyond that what i don't like about this layout is there's some strange oh i know what it is you see the letter spacing here you have some big letter spacing and then you have some smaller one it's because the type has been forced justified instead of just left justified so when you force justify it it expands all the type to fit the edges okay and we want to generally avoid that because it creates these things called rivers so what you're seeing here let me get my brush pen out here you're seeing bigger gaps and then you're seeing smaller gaps and it's kind of arbitrary what's happening here and you as the topographer you want to control that i don't know why but our eye tends to focus not only on the the material you put on on the page but also the negative space the shapes that are created in between like these shapes here you just need to pay attention to that so i think in general without a doubt if you're just getting started design and you want to improve your justify everything left just do it it works better it's easier to read and it's more pleasing to the eye so i would start doing that now you you're losing the cut off the edge part which is totally fine because all you have to do is then take this type and cut some of it off and it's implied that there's more there okay there's other things that you can do now this is revealing a problem of why of you not using our template is because now you're you're seeing the edges bleed beyond here and it's creating a different feeling than it would have if it's cut off and i'll show you what i mean if i take this layout which i'm going to i'm going to copy this and go to my composite file okay i'm going to grab one of my templates here let me just drag it down this is not going to be perfect because my artboard i can change power board okay i'm going to delete this part and i'm going to lock i'm not going to do it now okay there's your type center for layer so you see what happens now is we have a lot more freedom to move your layers around your type around and it it's going to be masked off so please if you're taking the course there's already a template just use it i don't know why you wouldn't it doesn't make a lot of sense to me okay so let's see what we can do to to make this layout a little bit more pleasing the problem with the layout as it stands right now is there's a lot of stuff happening all over the page and what we want to do is pick one focal point like what's the most important thing to you right now and it's hard to tell it's like there's this is resonate the title the mask head for the magazine and then there's the sub head or the i forget what that's called and then there's all this information it's really hard so it's really hard for us to distinguish what is important what is not oof let me get this back to normal here there will be a time and place for you guys to really experiment with type and push the boundaries i think in the later stages once you have a better handle on how to use type that's the time for that so we have all kinds of weird spacing in here give me a second while i work on that and mark if somebody has a question just let me know okay yep yeah i see why you did that okay and again justify left and hopefully when when i've finished this part now if you have resonate here and you pull it out just by a little bit that's all you need to do to make this thing stand out and pop okay you can you can group this with this if you wish or you can bring it down and make it grouped with this so if you keep working on this this should start to look like something here's another tip i want to share with you guys you see right here january february 2018 that information is kind of hard to work with right now but if you were just to change this to numerals or something else it'll be a lot easier for you to work with and it'll look different so something about numbers i just love the way numbers and other characters look besides the alphabet it just brings a different visual element to the to the page now again if you wanted to you could do an underscore here you can do an m dash oops that's not an m you can do a colon there's a lot of different things you can do to try to break this information up you can space this out you can even bring this to the top shoot and then move this down so some things for you to play around with and think about okay so my key takeaway for you right now so make sure you use the template move away from force justifying the type because you you're losing control over the spacing you're creating a lot of rivers and then to really try to find one focal point what is that thing that's going to make this thing interesting and then design everything else around that all right chris we have a quick question go ahead so kyle daley is asking is there ever a point to using the paragraph to force justify oh good question okay there is and it usually happens around newspapers like newspapers and some magazines like to force justify i don't know why they do and they like to have that and you have to spend a lot of time working the words and doing paragraph breaks so that they look good a lot of times writers can can do this and then they'll change the way that they write the words but if you're given words from somebody else obviously you need to respect the the text you were given and you're not really you're not supposed to change the text if it's if it's a it's some writer's work it's like somebody else changing your design so i find that it's very rare that there's a reason to force justify your attacks except for when i see it in newspapers it's a standard they do it you don't have to do it i guess for them it looks a little neater when all their columns line up okay thanks for that question so we're going to move on to ronan buckley right now uh let's take a look at ronan's work is running buckley on okay there's a bunch of things going on here so so ronan first thing i notice on this layout here is you're pushing all of your design elements to the edges okay i'll talk about why you generally just don't want to do that now an analogy i've used before and if you're a fan of the show you've heard me say things like this imagine this as the layout of a room like the floor plan and you're looking at it very rarely would you ever design a room and take all the furniture and push it all the way to the edges like the bed the bookshelf uh the nightstand all these things and that's how it kind of feels it's like we're just pushing everything to the edge and we're not utilizing the entire space okay so we're gonna look at more layouts this is not one of your more successful layouts and there's a lot of things that you're doing here you're you're putting some names in the darker or more transparent gray which you're allowed to use right different tints and shades and transparency totally legitimate but i think it's the idea that you're pushing everything to the edge if there's nothing else on this page and i'm going to try to do this right now like that would look really handsome just resonate january february 2018 i oh shoot these things really should should be like one group and not three things because it makes it hard for us to adjust the leading i would have just moved the lighting in a little tighter but then i'm kind of doing manually which is not the way you want to do this okay like that would look really good now we have a different problem it's like we have to design the rest of the page but taking all these things pushing an edge not a big fan of that you're not utilizing the entire space that were given probably of the three layouts that you submitted i i think this is your most successful one here just taking a minute to look at it here journal for graphic design okay i like this this is quite successful so this group of information all oops how come i can't draw a straight line anyways this group of information lines up on one access and it's good it's strong you pull that resonate above it all and you've broken it into different groups right so features i don't know why there's features twice here you probably don't need that okay and then there's this whoa holy cow okay so this was individually placed here okay a little bit of work there so journal for graphic design this becomes almost like an illustration a grid a dot pattern and i like it because it breaks up this you can almost say like this is obviously a group this is the second group that you would probably see and this is the third group depending on how you're seeing it but because you've kept everything relatively small you've created a lot of white space or negative space for yourself around these areas and so that your eye has opportunity to move around if you use a larger point size it would be much more difficult to do a layout like this so you're going to see in some layouts all i'm going to do is make the point size smaller and you're going to see the feeling of how you perceive it is improved okay so this is probably your best layout i like this treatment um probably a little bit more we can do here in terms of figuring out the files built in a strange way here let me group this so i wonder if bringing it closer to this or farther away would make it more or less interesting and seeing if we can get this to like three groups instead of one two three four five okay okay good job so don't save back to this here okay this is uh bertram christopherson is that right bertram yeah i like this i like that you're trying different ways to deal with a masthead from breaking up like this resin eight and writing it all the way out and then resonate with the divider line and then resonate with like a bullet point in between i encourage everybody that's working on this to go ahead and explore different ways of treating the mass head because we can deconstruct and reconstruct it in different ways which will give us some options okay a couple things i see here um aside from you doing the math head differently i'm noticing that you're using the same elements a little bit too much like for example this is literally that but just with less spacing right when i put them next to each other and we can try to do it in more different ways and it'll the more you explore the more you try the more you fail the more you're going to learn in this whole process okay so i'm going to encourage you to try to to break up your groups a little bit differently so that there's more ways of interpreting this information oh this has been outlined already huh yeah let me look at this okay uh in the future i'm gonna suggest that you don't outline your type and unless you're using some exotic cut of helvetica that very few people are gonna have i have a helvetica i have helvetica neuaya and i also have helvetica now and so if you're using um new house grotesque or some other version of helvetica i'm not gonna have it but i can't work on your file unfortunately okay there's no way for me to break this information up differently one thing i would suggest that you try and we've seen other people do it successfully is to take this this list and make it a paragraph just to see what options that opens up for you another thing i'm going to ask you to try explore is to take this and make it bigger like a like a bigger point size just so you get the feel for like how to deal with the information and we can learn a lot from that and i want you to try it in a different way so those of you guys that are trying this layout at home i'll show you what i mean res then nate let's say we do that right character helvetica i'm going to use helvetica now display and i'm going to use the light or thin weight so if you buy the complete font family from monotype on helvetica now you'll notice that i have so many different weights can you guys see that look it's doing a little dance on the screen shimming towards us and that opens up a lot of options can you lower that down chris i think it's being covered by your pop-up i don't know what we're talking about say again jonah can you lower down that uh font box thing yeah character box yeah yeah okay most afternoon let me put the paragraph controls in here too okay yeah so if you guys see if i highlight this you can see like i have a lot of different weights to work with all the way from hairline to extra black so the point of all this was to encourage you to try different weights like don't just use eight point type helvetica regular uh try something in bold try something [Music] even extra bold or black that's extra black and you're going to start to get a feel for how to use the different weights and you're going to learn so much more okay i just want you to encourage that because as i look at this it looks like you're using helvetica just regular weight the entire time and they're all almost all the same point size so you're gonna you're not gonna experience as much in terms of exploring the different point sizes and weights okay now you're only allowed to use one point size and one weight per layout but not for your entire set so maybe that wasn't clear all right i can't work on this file too much because it's already all outlined and i don't want to go through and move each character by hand so let me close that file don't say and just to fill people in if they're just joining so what we're doing here is we're going through an exercise from our typography 01 class and they're given a specific set of texts and the goal here is to learn how to break down text and see based on priority and hierarchy so chris is going through the exercises from the students in the class yes thanks mark all right this is from i don't know how to say this is that mls or emily ostakas and we're gonna just look at our layout right now or i don't know if it's a man or woman so sorry if i messed that part up i see so very similar things here everybody's using just that one let me lock the foreground mascara okay and this is 12 point type okay i'm going to suggest that you all try to do something it's strange but the way that computers are set up the default font and the point size is terrible usually it's terrible and the default typeface is usually something like myriad if you're on the mac and it's 12 point type i don't know why it's like the worst point size to work with or maybe because we see it so much that it just becomes really boring to us so in this case i'm going to take this let me uh let me duplicate this before i do that all right we'll put it to the side for now take this and i'm going to change the point size i'm going to change it to eight point and you'll notice now without changing the layout at all by just changing the point size to eight point we create so much more space for our eye to move around and i don't know about you but for me the layout feels like it's easier to breathe just because there's more negative space and so that's why i want to encourage you to try that conversely if i take this and i try to make it like 14 or 16 point type it creates a different feeling it feels more like a poster or something else it feels less precious and you want to just push this around okay so i'm just all i'm doing is changing point size there this is a pretty good layout by my judgment here and the reason why i like it is because it's not trying to do too much when you when you're when you have a lot of constraints like one point size one weight there's really not that much you can do so don't go and try to make some crazy things in there okay uh there's good hierarchy and alignment here that resonate is connected to the to the descriptor there so it's resonate and the journal for graphic design that makes a lot of sense those are grouped horizontally like that and then the rest of the information is grouped on a vertical axis we probably need to play around with spacing like let me try if i bring this down i'm just eyeballing this here we probably should be working with some kind of grid and i want to shift it because the other thing you want to try to do is avoid these middle spots like i said before you see this proportion or that amount of space it's not that different than this amount of space so i want to push and pull so if i were able to take this and push it here that becomes more interesting layout or the opposite way which is to try to push it here so when you guys have a grid try to go not in the middle okay so if i take this i know i'm just trying to go on one side maybe that's more interesting i don't know or i go the other way and you may find that the spacing between the resonate and the rest of this this column of text might be too far away so you bring it in closer and that gives you a lot more options now okay some things to think about there yeah so what i'm seeing here and i want to encourage you guys for the next pass at this is to try to break up your text in different ways when i look at these two they're almost the exact same layout except for they're done with justified right type instead of justified left type or flush left flush right right so if you see in this issue it's it's exactly the same breakup almost and then the features here it's just flipped that's all it is so i want you to try to explore make some ugly layouts try to do the weirdest thing and then figure out why doesn't it work and then fix that and then you're going to discover a lot more okay closing this file okay this is yoonji uh who's who reminded me she's been on the show before so i'm glad to see her work here there's some pretty cool things happening here so i i think i know how to make this layout a little bit better uh this confuses me a little bit uh because resonate is facing this way and the h should be connected to this and i would appreciate it if this were just flipped around so if i double click on this and type in 180 degrees it should be facing the right way at this point there's really no reason why you would make this upside down in my opinion because they're connected okay you dropped the baseline and i think that's fine and so you're going to start to see some layouts now where people are taking uh what is normally a layout like this and then they're rotating it and sometimes rotating off axis like that gives a little kind of dynamic energy it feels unsettled off kilter so you want to make sure the layout works first before you rotate it that you kind of understand the principles of design because it just makes a little harder to work with um because you have less space to work with okay but i think in terms of the layouts that you submitted this is your most interesting layout and i think once we start to open up the parameters you'll you'll have a lot more uh options to work with for example you could have taken this in the in the next in the coming weeks where you can make it a lot bigger and it creates a lot more uh visual interest than you have right now so let's try this again let's take this it is also 12 points let's try 10 point and how it opens up the space and you're using bold here let's try light and see what happens oh i can't seem to switch it okay what is going on i see yunji you also have helvetica now it seems like that's cool do you have the entire family i think so you do wow so i'll send you the link for of course wow okay that's very cool no no i didn't i found it that's why that's what i meant i'll send you the link no don't send me any illegal links yeah we're friends with people type i'm just saying hey you're gonna pretend like this was not said but all right but you should try different weights right so text weight and and display weight etc and to then look at light bulb and regular because just by changing that you're going to get a whole different feel right so don't stick to just one point size one weight per layout you have to stay to that but in in your exploration you could try a lot of different point sizes so let me see here in the journal for graphic design okay uh yunji is doing something interesting here too she's using all caps to separate this information from this which is upper lowercase or title case uh depending how you look at that right lester peel did you spell lester beale right is that how you spell less reveal let's look at king let me just verify something it is okay dodged a bullet there all right so um i like the way that you've broken uh shoot see once you start putting something on an on an angle like this it's really hard to keep things aligned so like like i was saying before design it vertically and horizontally get it right and then as your last little thing try to rotate it because once you do that it just makes it really hard to work with there's some things here that you can really push this is the one time where i think hey what if you were to push this right to the edge because this will glue it together so it should be on the same baseline which i'm having a hard time lining up perfectly right and i'll show you what i mean let me try just use this draw a line this is my baseline here so i can connect this okay you should have this like right around here that way your eye can complete that your eye will take us across there and there's other things you can do that might be event like might be kind of interesting for you to play with right so they still follow the same axis this grid you know what the heck did i just do okay because it's i don't know it's not lined up here we go so guys i'm i'm winging this right now i don't want to go through like the process of making sure those things line up and now you might say wow i'm breaking that connection between resin and eight that's where you can go back and type this in as eigh ht if that helps to create a stronger baseline to draw your eye across okay but i think that's probably like you can push that and try moving that up there and maybe taking this and moving a little closer to this i'm not sure i'm trying to also avoid the splitting the composition in half because if you look at this it is almost literally like in half here if i take this and draw it like that you see you want to try to push it either to the thirds like the one third rule where and i'll show you what i mean we can take all this now avoid this line and just move it there and let me see if i delete this what happens so you try to go that way and you could try to go the other way and see what what you get okay uh let's see here these are pretty standard okay now i'm going to take a break from looking at the three layouts and i'm going to switch gears here i want to remind everybody that's tuning in right now if you're interested in learning more about typography and you need a crit of your own this is a five-step process that you guys can follow to be able to critique your own work is to choose a focal point choose one thing that's really important to you it doesn't have to be the same thing every single layout try something different think about the order and usually we talk about groups of three and then having a primary a secondary and tertiary read to introduce one element of surprise you shouldn't see with yunji choose like pushing type and throwing things off access and having a little bit of fun with that i strongly encourage you to do that uh just reducing the point size and and playing around with the different weights of the fonts that you're using can create a lot more negative space or reduce negative space but in a very intentional way and then finally we get into the details since this is the first week that we're critiquing this work we are not focusing too much on the details because i think there are some bigger broader problems that we're trying to resolve let me jump in here i've i went through all the submissions and i copy and pasted some of the layouts here for us just to talk about okay now i'm going to talk about this one right here this is from lars pal and very nice layout you can see that it's off access or not off access i'm sorry it's pushing away from the center center line which is right here and and lars is using these black lines in here which makes the layout look really good the only problem is we're not allowed to use lines right now so lars's instincts are like this needs something i want you to create visual interests without adding additional elements at this stage so this one is like one of those strikes right where a good layout but not following the rules and for right now you need to stay within the constraints that you were provided and also here we see another layout this is from christina tastana and she's on on the live call with us because i saw her earlier very similar to what yunji was doing and tilting it off access creating very simple grouping here and it's very strong layout and i i can tell that she knows how to use compositional elements so she felt something was off so you know how with yunji's layout which i've closed already we put one of the letters up here and then she rotated the type i could do it here just rotate it maybe i could do it more scientifically and rotate it like this 90 degrees boom okay so oh i see so you you kind of cheated christina but you you worked within the parameters this is kind of interesting we'll talk about this in a second so with yunji's layout she had something like this right and then she separated she divorced like one letter from their s and that is very similar to what christine is doing but just using type so when when you understand how to manipulate the type you can create the same feeling as these lines that christina is using just with type and perhaps lars can figure out the same thing and that's why having these constraints are really good at pushing your exploration and trying a lot of different things okay now i was going to strike you with a foul here with adding these elements but you just added dashes or minus signs so i think you're still kind of you're still good within the parameters what we're doing i love that you're kind of found a legal way to cheat a little bit by adding lines and i'm going to say for next week let's not do that okay i think this is totally fine it's actually a really nice layout i like these elements that you've added because it creates visual interest it it pulls my eye across the screen across the page and that's usually something that you want so she didn't feel compelled to fill the entire page but by adding this line and this line she activates the rest of the page and i think that's really cool and she also added this separator for the journal for graphic design so you can see these dashed lines help to say this is a different piece of information than the rest of this even though it's the same point size and the same weight on the same grid point so nicely done there christina okay let me jump around here here's another one i want to look at okay this is from james flynn i think james is in here as well but i'm not sure so james uh you're also using the older typeset so i apologize if you've taken the course before and you're submitting war to be critiqued that's totally fine but since then we've updated the course and if you haven't looked at it recently you'll want to re-watch it because we added more critique videos and more tips on how to build stronger layouts as you're getting started okay i saw an opportunity here to to design something so i'm going to lock this good it's locked all right is it what is that okay anyways the layer's been locked so we could design it okay we have clearly three groups we have hierarchy we have one we have two and we have three and like i said before i'm going to read from top to bottom left to right so my scan my scans across the top and i move bottom and then i get to this point here okay that makes sense the problem i have with this layout is there's not a lot of relationship between these three things james and i want to try to find a way to make them tied together and you can the easiest and the strongest way to do this is to find a grid point like a grid line like that and get some of the things to line up and another way is to get things to line up on that good point okay and if you guys are using grids this is what the grids are for they help to keep things ordered if you take a bunch of things and you drop them on the floor they feel chaotic they feel messy and it doesn't look pleasing to the eye the the instance the instant you put them in a box of like a gridded box then all of a sudden all that chaos becomes a lot easier to process and it looks pleasing to the eye and so that's what the grid will do for us it'll allow us to organize things that don't necessarily feel as ordered as they want to be so i want to move this out of the way okay so i have an idea here i think there's an opportunity here shoot okay what i'm going to do is i'm going to take this text first i want to make it a part of this group there's no reason why it needs to be in a separate group all right now generally speaking when we look at type and if i were to ask you to read these two pieces of information the left side or the right side and at least in america here or english-speaking countries you're going to say that probably this one's easier to read than this group and why is that because when our eye is scanning the page it's able to find this corner point and say el disitsky wolfgang vinegar alvin lipstick whereas this one our eye has to work a lot harder let me get the brush here it has to work a lot harder brushes where are you yeah it has to work a lot harder to find each and every one of these points and after a while if you're reading a lot it becomes very fatiguing and that's why generally speaking paragraphs are set like this on a straight line so it's easier for you to find edges and to read the type now having said that there's still ways to make this work right now if i were to take these two pieces of information and to interlace them there's a relationship that's created here now this looks really hard to read and the reason why it's really hard to read is probably this would be better if there's upper lower case it's just upper lowercase is going to be a lot easier to read because if you look at this watch i'll show you we'll take alvin copy that actually i have a better example okay the example is this and everybody that's driven on the freeway knows what i'm talking about or will know in a second i'm going to make this bold okay when you're driving down the freeway and you have a split second to figure out if you're on the correct ramp north or south and this is why there's a lot of accidents like i can't tell i just can't tell because almost all these letters are the same and here's why it's because we recognize the shapes before we can read the letters right so if we were to bring this over and we're to try to do this in upper lower case you're going to start to see this and it's still a very very similar shape so if we go further if we just reduce it down to this and this it's very now very difficult to mistake north from south because they have very different properties and what i mean is this if we were to take a pen and block this out i'm gonna block it out right now i'm gonna do this crudely okay if you were just driving down the street and you had a split second to make a decision you're going to know north from south because they have very different forms as opposed to these right this is a little bit better than this because if you were to drive down the street it would look like this to you i think this is why they're people who are just jumping on the on or off ramp really fast because they just realize they're in the wrong lane this is where uh design really does matter because design can kill or at least bad design can kill right you guys see the difference there and then if i were to do this it'd be very similar to this i could block this out block this mark any questions yes we do so we got a couple coming up we'll keep them up so we got kang and then we've got brian butler coming up so kang will i meet you and go ahead and ask your question hey so when you're moving your type around on some of those layouts were you thinking of just the relation in space or were you kind of planning to use a grid afterwards oh okay good question um i've been designing for some time now that a lot of the grid is kind of pre-baked into my brain but for a lot of you guys that are starting out i would strongly suggest that you use a grid to help teach you about proportion relationship and repetition and i'm moving them around based on many years over 20 years of laying out type that i kind of now instinctively know where to put stuff okay now in the beginning of my career and my journey into typography i was a slave to the grid the grid ruled my life and for good reason because it made things make sense uh so we can talk about the grid in a little bit uh did i answer your question king was that king was it something else yup that was king okay cool uh okay was there another question no yep we have one from brian butler here let me mute him okay brian are you on yep can you hear me no brian we can hear you loud and clear man all right uh so if the primary goal of a piece is to communicate in a logical manner if we need a focal point um then for like this example should resonates consistently be the thing that we design um so people would notice it first yeah very good question man very good question okay uh and the the answer i'm going to give you it may make you more frustrated and happy okay now you could say uh that resonate should be as the mass head of a magazine this is like some kind of art journal right should always be the focal point like here right but in in terms of like how we can interpret this information if you're a long time subscriber to resonate as a as an art journal you may care more about the contents so like who are the artists are going to feature this week or this month and then that may become more important or you're a collector and you're you want to make sure that you're getting the february or january february issue then that may be the thing that you pull up and highlight and for typography and what we're trying to do in the in this course and these exercises is to really start to say this is important to me i'm going to find a creative way to bring this to the top and it's not always should it always be resonate but i'm sure if you were becoming the creative director of the magazine they would probably frown upon you for moving their masthead around so much it would probably be bad form because people need to see that and say yep that's the magazine that i love that's the one i want to buy so you would confuse people but for the sake of this exercise pull anything out try it and see what works as long as you can find a reason why in your mind at least it is important to pull it out so that's how i cut it right in the middle so mostly yes but not always okay any other questions got a good one from youtube here from key web concepts so they're asking when you talk about looking at layouts like a blueprint or a floor plan uh what do you mean oh okay all right um let me think about uh okay mark just let me know about that one uh remind me because i'm gonna find a layout where it's very clear what's happening and then i'll talk about it okay all right about the whole floor plan uh okay all right um all right so we were here we're talking about upper lower case and legibility and you know legibility is really really important until we start to get into experimental layouts and then you can start to play around with it because you're going to see that once you learn how to control type and make it interesting that you can start to like really push the boundaries of legibility and still make it readable to people okay all right so i'm going to take this chunk here and then just move it out of the way move over here okay so getting back to this i i still think that there's an opportunity here to lace this together and i want to show you how to make it work so first of all these letters because they're all caps it starts to blend together in here and i want to introduce you some ideas things that you can try out on your own okay so what we can do is we can try to increase the leading which is on the mac option down arrow right so i'm increasing both theoretically the same and then we can try to lace it one way or the other and see if we can create something interesting i i think i'm i'm battling the fact that it's hard to read to begin with but we're gonna we're not gonna give up yet so i think command shift l will justify it both on the left so i can take this now and try and move it to the left here and create more options for you guys to look at and hopefully this starts to um open up your mind as to what you can what you can do in this layout too i would suggest that um who is this james try to go eight point okay so i'm gonna go eight point oh it was already small okay eight point now let's say we were only allowed to use all caps how do we create separation between these two groups right yeah we could do like this which is how a lot of people are doing it but there's another way we can do it to create separation between these two groups if i were to hit option and the right arrow on my keyboard i can open up the tracking and increase it to a point and if i just keep doing that where's my type here i think it's here if i did say 400 no that's not enough let's say 750 to really open it up now you can see like oh there's no mistaking that this is one group and this is a different group but they're kind of related because of the proximity to each other right so this is where i want you guys to play with your type to see if you can create something that's more interesting looking while still working with the parameters of the information you're given okay now i may decide you know features is usually it's the opposite of the way that you have this type set usually features would be all caps and then arm and hoffman would be upper lower case okay anyways i could probably increase the spacing between features in this just as to visually separate it from that group and now what i would do is then take this and move it over so it lined up with this so now you get you guys get the feeling of this and how this is starting to feel a little different so you can't adjust you can't change the point size or the weight for each layout but you can change the leading and the tracking which create a lot of different options for you more than you thought okay if i were to take this and decrease you'll see that this becomes a lot denser on the page so if i were to zoom out versus opening up the leading it would feel more airy and light okay and the last thing i need to do is to figure out how to make this work with this so again i'm going to switch this to justified left or flush left and see what else i can do here it's not feeling totally cohesive and we'd have to really work on this to make it work here but i i kind of wanted to demonstrate with james's work like other options things that you can try and find success in all right okay um mark how are we doing on time are we okay we're about an hour in but we do have a question and then you want to move on to the next design right ask a question so this one is from beartron go ahead hi how's it going hello um so i was just wondering you know when we're jumping into the design program we're trying to align all the elements to these different grids yeah um and uh i was experimenting with like the golden ratio like seven columns and like 12 columns all these different grids how would you go about picking the grid for a project uh that that fits fits the content does that make sense yeah i good question uh i don't think okay there's a lot to be made about grids and i think in some cases people ignore them and some people worship them and i don't think either is totally right i think it's usually somewhere in between now i'm going to show you how to deal with this grid thing here let me unlock this layer let me delete this i actually created something here all right i'm gonna copy it over here okay i don't think grids are conceptual so tying that into giving it more meaning that it is and we've seen people friends of ours actually do golden section golden ratio grids on top of everything and it's actually you're just making stuff up because it doesn't even line up it's like forcing a design that you like into following a grid system that doesn't even exist in the original you guys want to make them all right all right so i'm gonna show you grid right now so this is a fibonacci sequence and the fibonacci sequence is fantastic as a is a has a grid that's very dynamic and i want to show you how to do that let me make this black i'll make a blue you guys can see that right okay now i want to repeat this across and the easiest way to repeat is to grab this and then just go like this and hit that and then hit command d it just duplicates it hopefully i've done this right so that it's correct like it's not uh misaligned there we go all right so the fibonacci sequences uh you take uh two numbers and then you add it and that equals the second number or the third number in the sequence so it looks something like this if i were to have my type tool here and it would go like one sorry this is not in a place where you can see it okay you guys know fibonacci right so it's one and then and these are the two numbers you start out with okay my tracking is out of control here back to zero okay so you add up those two numbers and it'll equal two you add up one and two or equals three and then two and three equals five three and five equals eight and eight and five equals thirteen and thirteen and eight equals twenty one and that's your fibonacci sequence okay now this number there's some very special things about this number sequence that was discovered and so what we can do is we can use that so i'm going to take all these things i'm going to move it down so i'm going to take two units so there's one one and i'm gonna move it here right so one one and then i'm gonna do two so let me hit this so you can see a little bit better and then three one two three four five one two three four five six seven eight okay that's as far as i can go because i'm gonna run out of space so if you look at this ratio of blue blocks here you'll see that it's actually very dynamic so 1 1 2 3 5 8 right and we can leave the rest alone and it's going to make sense in a little bit not just yet so if i scale this up holding down shift oops i need to drop the anchor point right here hold down shift and make it fit on this page okay if i were doing this like it mattered like i got paid for this i would spend a little bit more time working on this than now and then i'm going to bring on my guides and hit command r to bring the rulers out and i'm going to snap it to that point can you guys see the guideline right there i can go and change this color here i like a less obnoxious like really brilliant blue glide because it's overpowering sometimes but in order for you guys to see it and also did it do it yeah and then i'm gonna do line so you can see it very clearly now okay you see that guide so that's one one right so i'm gonna do it again snap it to this and just keep going i'm sure somebody knows a faster way of doing this i'm not that person today okay so if i grab all these things now i'm going to rotate this 90 degrees i lost a piece let me group this okay so i'm going to rotate this now i could start this this is kind of like the the decision that you have to make as a designer as to where this grid wants to start and it's just something to help you not something to enslave you okay let's say like i like where this starts here so now i'm going to pull grid lines down here everybody's following me so far and when i start using this grid you'll start to see like wow that's that's really how you use it so i'm going to flip it using the mirroring tool which is keyboard shortcut o and holding that option as i click on this it'll flip it upside down right i'm going to flip it vertically oops sorry i went the other way okay now i can also pull this grid so it could start here so it repeats that direction or i could do it like repeating here but i think i'm gonna try it here all right everybody see the grid now i'm going to put this somewhere else get off my page all right now what i'm going to do is i'm going to add bounding boxes or grid lines for the page itself okay there we are so there's your grid this is a fibonacci grid arbitrarily decided on the horizontal axis here and you can see that now if i were to place typography in these boxes and use this to govern how i'm going to do a layout i'm going to show you okay so i'm going to switch my color now back to black all right i got black ink so i wanted to draw a box so the rule of using the grid is this is that the first thing that you put on a page is arbitrary it's the only thing that's arbitrary at that point so why is it snapping to it okay i'm gonna put something down right here okay that's the first thing that's it now you have to make decisions based on that one thing that you put on the page so if i say like i want something to relate to that i may want to create something here and i want to create something down here okay so this is how you use the grid system so that you can create dynamically proportionate things that kind of feel related to each other and as soon as i add or change one element on here it impacts the layout the feeling of the layout and if it feels off balance then this first thing that was arbitrary needs to move and this is the push and pull of typography and design you put down that one dot now you kind of have to move things around to make it work within that uh so this will also teach you things like this i'm going to show you something let me move this out of the way let me just delete that you could take this sucker and you could put it over here so i'm going to hide this right now you can see like this will be related to this this is related to that this is not a terribly interesting layout and this is to remind you just because you use a grid doesn't mean it's good it's just a starting point for us to work okay now let's get back to that one question that was asked by people watching this live on youtube like what did i mean by floor plan okay and this is what i mean imagine like this is the layout of your house okay we're looking from a top-down point of view for like from a bird's-eye view down onto your thing and if you were to have like a dresser a nightstand and a bed or something like that like how would you lay it out uh and if you're really trying to to to make it interesting you would try to kind of use the entire space so there's a flow and a movement you wouldn't necessarily just put the bed in this corner the dresser in that corner unfortunately this is how a lot of american households are laid out and then this over here it just would not make for a very interesting room there'd just be a lot of space in the middle and not much else but if we were to look at say a living room or something where you have a stand for the for the tv some couches you start to lay it out and you would start to kind of configure other furniture shoot in a way that activates a space so somebody walks into your home like wow that's really cool love the layout and they're seeing things and interior designers know this also this this works like if you were designing a grid pattern for building for example this and you see this a lot actually in modern architecture okay this isn't exactly line imagine now you're looking at the facade of a building instead of just having let me delete all this let's say that you're looking at the facade of a building it's like a office park somewhere right and that's how a building looks and you're going to see a door here if i can get that tool right right there there's your office building with retail space on the ground floor this is why i tell you guys that typography and learning to design with type opens the door to designing everything and massimo benelli was famous for saying if you can design one thing you can design everything and this is what he's referring to okay once you understand proportion scale balance all that kind of stuff so that's a building that's how most buildings look not very interesting to me at all now look what happens when i delete some of these things for all of these things i guess i should have just done it all at once and you actually created a more interesting pattern for windows for the sake of speed here that the building had more interesting patterns of color or windows or something it becomes a lot more interesting to look at just imagine everything snapped to that grid and then you you walked up on this building and you'll see this now in modern architecture where buildings don't follow that same kind of repetition that there's a breaking up of that grid line okay i hope that answered i probably confused more people than i helped right now apologize in advance guys all right let's get back to this thing now i'm not going to be able to critique everybody so i'm going to kind of push through some of this here where did you discuss that layout i actually like what's happening here uh this is from yoshino kumar kumar guy yoshino kumar guy that uh it's using one point size and uh i i think they're using either grays or tints or shades shoot let's see what this looks like where's my properties panel okay so the opacity is 40 and this is totally within the boundaries to create almost like a different weight of font by changing the transparency or the opacity of this type of bold it almost feels like it's you're getting an extra weight in there okay there's some things that are problematic here i think you're double spacing and double spacing depending on the letters before and after i think the characteristics in a space change so you may want to find a different way to separate this and here's one way you could do it you could just do an underscore to separate the names that's just one way and it actually adds a little kind of visual element something that christina was using with dashes or minus symbols you can use divider lines if you want and there's a lot more that you can do here okay okay that doesn't look so good what if i just delete that and i did something else you don't always have to use spaces to separate things you can use transparency so if this were 40 and you alternated every other name that could work so there's a lot of options here and if anything if you're watching this either participate participating part of this class or just watching live just try things to kind of see what works to break it that should be your intention let me try and see if i can break it and if i don't allow myself to use um within working within a lot of constraints what else can i do to make this layout work how do i separate information so now when you put in the space back in it's even easier to read okay that's i think that's all i wanted to say about this i mean i like that they're they're using the bolt type face and a much bigger point size than we've seen and i think that's pretty cool uh i think this layout would be improved a little bit if we just didn't push everything to the corner so the top part being pushed to the corner is cool i think we just need to find a way to bring this back in and maybe then the layout works again again i would encourage you to probably oh i see one one kind of temporary a little bit of a problem here you've decreased the tracking so much so that the letters start to touch together that's called the ligature i guess in a way and this is problematic here you see this little triangle now if you want to do that there is a way to make that work what i would encourage you to do is i'm going to delete all this stuff this is just an example here is to try this and and this does work and i've done this before and people get all crazy on me like nah it's not good design okay sure if you say so okay if you have transparency like this try to even get it to even be more overlapping because then it looks more intentional versus just having a sliver so it's one of those things where you don't want to be kind of aligned or kind of off set you want to be really offset or really off alignment and that's one way you can handle that and i think if we were just to actually delete letters here which we can do because it still works like that oops there with less letters it's even easier to read okay so that's how you make that work so before and after let's look at this okay there that feels like a mistake an oversight whereas this uh it's hard to say like that's not intentional so just to be intentional with your design okay all right okay this is the work of marianna monroy and there's something here that's really cool i just wanted to point out to everybody who's looking at the design i really like how you handled this the resin eight kind of being to the power of eight and a parenthesis and adding that to it i think that's really clever and i like to encourage other people to explore breaking your type up differently from layout to layout just to create a lot of components to work with so that you can really play the rest of it is just pretty standard but i just really like that part how you handled that okay we talked about that one already um this is an interesting layout here from uh from yoon kyon and i like the interlacing of the type creating different levels of tints or transparency to help break up the information you can see it creates the nice little rhythm there they picked one central axis to work off of and okay no surprise here you know what i'm going to do oh are there two point sizes here let's see that's 12 point huh what point size is this that seems to be off so you have one that's not 12 points i'm going to make a 10 point actually i'm not i'm gonna make it eight point i like what you what you did here this is all caps it lines up with the journal for graphic design telling the reader this is connected but this is black so there's a strong focal point there and this is tracked out a lot more than this so it's we're related but we're different i like that well done there uh this person uh jung kyun has decided that the january february is very important to them it probably isn't as important as they're making it but that's their right to decide okay if that's the case what i would do is make this black and not this there's something that's a little bit off for me in terms of like the hierarchy if this were like this i'm assuming that that's the same grip good okay if that were like this i think it would be a stronger layout so the blackness of this would draw me here first get me to to look at this and i'll look at that as a third and maybe move this around a little bit not sure where to put this just yet is this a good candidate to talk about floor plan blueprints yeah i thought i already did that but um yeah i just like if we were to walk into this building let's just say i'm gonna draw a person right now okay i'm gonna draw a person and round off their shoulders a little bit and give him a head getting high tech here guys super hyped my guys all right that's a person and i'll give this person a nose there that's a nose in case somebody has the wrong idea right and i'll give this person a red shirt or something so you can see them a little bit better there there's your person can you guys see that so i'm gonna group this person together now as a person i'm gonna scale this person down okay let's say they're walking into a cool exhibit in a museum and they're walking okay they're like oh this is really cool they can check this out they can walk around stuff and they can walk over here and look at this that's like some interesting table display that you've got to come back here and i'm gonna turn them around like they look at this i'm like wow this is really cool so there's a way for them to navigate around this thing and you say you're probably thinking to yourself chris what's this got to do with typography well your eye is not that different than this person your eye is going to travel around the design and it goes from point to point looking at things and there's science scientific studies tracking people's eyes and how they look at layouts understanding the relationship with these things and if you were to put all of these things to the edges well you can see now there's not a lot of things for your eye to do so it just goes to the edges that goes over there goes here and then it's done it doesn't seem as interesting to us and and that's kind of what we're trying to do is to create something that's legible but yet draw somebody in to look at it if you can't stop somebody uh in terms of catching their attention and looking at what it is that you're doing then all your beautiful type won't matter at all so we have to create some kind of visual interest to draw people in okay okay this is from tony gibbs tony uh here's one of your layouts here i think again what's wrong too big right total point default i like that you're using light i'll just make this 10 because i i don't hate 10 12 is just so boring okay and grouping this stuff is a little funky let me ungroup that okay typically when you do a layout like this what i would recommend that you do is to keep everything in one paragraph group and that way the leading will line up things will line up better i'm not quite sure if you're doing this by hand but it creates problems for you so i want you to try this tony if we were to take this and push it really far out what happens well we lose the connection between these things and obviously that's impossible to read so what happens if we go the other way what if we bring it close okay that's that's a relationship but maybe not one that we want and then what happens if we interlace it or weave it in oh okay that creates a little bit more kind of visual tension that i think is good um and that's probably how we can make this work so that's a little bit more interesting now there's this thing like is this hanging too far off the edge of this thing i don't know so what we should do is we should try to bring it in but then i realize right now we have a small problem in that this is flush right and that's flush left so if we were to make it both flush left it probably will work a lot better i can't do that right now because of the way this is laid out so tony if you're going to continue doing this with us what i would suggest in the future is to keep this in a paragraph grouping and not breaking out into individual lines be a lot easier for you to work with okay all right see we already talked about that i think we're kind of done here yeah i think i've talked about everything on this page so let me save this okay i think we went through this and while you're doing that chris we should remind everybody that's watching so if you're wondering you know how people submitted their designs and how chris is critiquing them these are again people from our typography one class so there are series of exercises there and we're critiquing week one's exercise we're going to continue with the remaining exercises so if you're in the course just look out for an email from me or join the slack group for typography one and then you'll see the request there yeah we're doing this again next week right and next week it's a little bit more interesting because we're going to open up the parameters a little bit uh do you remember what the next week this assignment is the parameters mark i believe it's two point sizes point sizes i mean it's a world of opportunities now anyways i'm going to get back into it real quick i'm going to power through this in the next six or seven minutes i'm going to wrap this up this is from johannes yellen i think or jell-o okay um johannes has done something kind of interesting he's made the paper itself a different color shade of gray and this will work on your computer but when you go to print this thing out it's going to be very problematic because you're going to see lots of little dots okay but on the computer it looks quite beautiful it looks really nice this is one of those things where i i would encourage you to johannes to really try more layouts more configurations to do things that you think are not going to work and when they break find a way to make them work because i'm seeing a little bit too much of the same right this looks like a kind of a nice letterhead here with everything center at the top and and then you have these bits at the bottom not a lot of relationship pulling the eye towards these two things and hopefully if you're still confused about this whole like floor plan idea you know it's like there's an exhibit on the north side of the building and an exhibit on the south side of the building but not a lot for me to go from one to the next and my eye needs something okay and i think of your three layouts probably uh this one is one of your more successful ones unfortunately this has all been outlined so i can't do a whole lot to it let me check yeah it's all outlined right now so unless again you're using an exotic version of helvetica not even necessary for something like this just use standard old helvetica and i can then work with it so the alignment is kind of tricky but just maybe a simple adjustment like that could make it look really good so uh johannes is doing a bunch of good things here taking one access and then offsetting this type a little bit which was what we've been talking about and creating three dominant groups with like one focal point i like it successful okay moving on kento yoshida kanto all right let's look at yours a lot of really interesting things that you're doing in here uh the ones on the left and the right are your most successful layouts to me and let's talk about i'll start with the one on the left first then okay i i think i mentioned this earlier about using different devices to separate things and i think it's quite interesting to be able to use these these diagonal lines these divider lines slashes uh and then to make them more opaque than the remaining artists i think that's kind of cool and that's what your eye looks at so there's a really nice rhythm there i would have i think the layout would be stronger if you just saved this device this this diagonal line just for the features so i think repeating them up here and then making them uh fade out with transparency is actually not making it stronger it's diminishing the power of this okay i don't think you need this here nor here resin eight okay and then okay so now that i've changed that this is feeling a little out of place here i believe we could probably just take these two things um it's a command what is it uh where's my alignment tools just align them like that and bring them back in and offset them like that we want to simplify it right so it might be cool to take this and just move it down a little bit so that there's more separation it's not working for me just yet it's a game of proportion and just nudging things around shoot there's too many things going on here where are my layers i need to lock that background okay good so sometimes you have a long line like this the journal for graphic design and what's happening is it's cutting off all this beautiful space around it so in a case like that the journal maybe you just hit return here and now you kind of change the way that this whole thing looks because you're giving yourself a lot more space to work with so sometimes that works and sometimes the inverse works where you take this and you i'm gonna do something a little wacky right now guys it may make your eyes hurt a little bit but let's see what happens now most people see the page as a kind of two-dimensional thing but what if you did something like this where you continue to thought across the page and that could work too so the your eye will follow this resonate the journal for graphic design now the one thing i don't like about this is that it cuts off the space right it's creating a space of a volume right here and then it's creating a volume down here which i don't like it would be better if we could i'm cheating here just to demonstrate what i'm talking about i'm going to scale this down right it's already looking better just by just by doing that and if i were to open it up like this so that at least there's space to flow through but you guys will find out soon enough in this in these exercises that using a smaller point size gives you so much more real estate to work with because you can't change the page of dimensions but you can change the point size now as soon as i say that somebody's going to do a three-point thing which will be totally illegible so just caution you six points is probably the smallest you can make this so i'm going to return this all back to normal okay so i think that's a pretty good layout and i like what you're doing here when you find one trick just use it sparingly don't try to replicate it everywhere and in future weeks when we start to open it up to more elements i'll teach you how to use that one trick and make it tied to other things without overusing it okay here's another one here let me just look at this okay pretty standard stuff and uh kento i'm not sure if you're using the grid uh it looks like you have a grid but they doesn't seem like you're obeying the grid not sure okay this is like what one two three four eight column grid oh you're using different grids for each one interesting okay all right i think here again watch all i'm going to do is make this smaller and you'll see you're late i'll just get better i'm not even going to change anything all right and i think your use of grays or transparency is actually really good here because although there's a lot of information on the page our eye will just see the things of greatest contrast so the area of greatest contrast is right here let me let me do this so you guys can see that it's right here so that really jumps out because it it's got a sea of black around it and just a little bit of white so okay keep keep going down this path can't i'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with next so say this and close it okay who's working says king king who we know king all right okay so kang [Music] the risk of repeating myself quite a bit here you see you've come up with a really you've come up with a really kind of interesting typeset here for the magazine the mass head and the date why are there so many boxes here what the heck okay so i guess you're using those for proportion and space but next time just delete them or turn them to guides or something and there's a really easy keyboard shortcut to turn things into guides which i'm going to do right now with you i'm going to select these and just hit command 5 it'll make them into guides so they won't be there anymore okay now you notice why like before i turn my guides into dots and not lines because it's super annoying to look at all this and so you can go back into your preferences which is command k go to guides and grids and change them into dots see now you can actually see your design again when you do that okay i'm going to hide the guides which is command colon or semicolon all right i think you've come up with something kind of nice here and then you're using it again so if you're going to submit three designs let's go crazy here and if you look at these two layouts they're almost identical there's not enough exploration and and all i can say is the more you push the more you try the more you fail the more you're gonna see yourself grow by leaps and bounds okay so i would recommend that because if you look at it yeah this is just that but like this you see the layout's almost the same so the only difference here between these two layouts really is taking the type and pushing it on the edge okay now if you do this on the edge here uh try one where there's nothing else it's just one thing like everything is super simple but this one thing that you put on the edge okay yeah same same same way of breaking this information you guys see that all right let's try and break it up let's see what else you can come up with king i know you got it in you okay we're down to the last two joshua gilly here and okay um i think this layout is very nice it's very simple also joshua is doing this thing where he's changed the paper color to like a shade of gray and i think that creates an interesting visual here it works for screen again and when you go to print this out it may not look so good to you and if you're not sure go ahead and hit it on your laser printer and see what happens okay and other than that i'm just trying to find like where this thing belongs it feels a little bit out of place here i think you made it centered uh to solve the problem like i don't know what to do with it i think it would work just as fine if you were to line it up with something like that rather than aligning with the page say say to people this relates to this or this relates to this piece of information here and be done with it now once i do that you're going to realize also very similar breakup of the body text here so let's push it josh okay nicely done i think you have good sense sensibility and an eye for design i just want you to try more especially because you're only submitting three show me three radically different things like one on the far left one on the far right and something wacky in the middle okay last but not least we have mojo okay mojo is doing something uh really wacky here so i applaud you for trying this mo and that he's taking resonate and he's repeating it and using transparencies to kind of create this echoey blurry um light leaking kind of thing uh and he's doing it quite a bit right maybe this is now oh lots of copies okay here's what i'm gonna say mo take this idea and make it the superstar and the hero and that's it by repeating it three times you diminish the power of what it is that you're doing if you just did this one trick and kept everything else really super simple i think it might make for something interesting i quite like this replication like it's really kind of blurry and weird looking if that were done for say the mass head or something else i think that could be cool and then make everything else subservient to that okay in this one see this is what i mean like when i say go try stuff and break it um most definitely mo is trying stuff and breaking it so now mo's thing is going to be to try to pull him back and show some restraint so this is good for the discussion of what we're doing here today you guys because some people have stayed really tight in what they're going to explore and some people like mo are going bananas and i like that now it's like moe has to lean towards the middle a little bit where everybody else has to lean a little bit more towards the edges i like that you repeated the type here using type as pattern and texture probably kind of tough to work with this huh yeah okay and then moe's kind of deleted some of the type in here to help make this more legible so i like the the the texture and the repetition again if this were just like one giant block a copy instead of like trying to do this super dynamic layout maybe that pattern repetition would be more successful for you okay okay i think that's it for me let me close this thanks everybody for kind of joining us today to talk about type and this is just week one of i think seven weeks we'll be back next week when we're allowed to use two point sizes i think that's what mark said so when you go to do this next week when you try two point sizes try two point sizes that are radically different like a really small one and a big one and see what happens see if you can make it work and then bring them gradually closer together okay and if you're also curious when you're going to critique the work for next week ask yourself is there a clear focal point do i understand the order in which i'm supposed to look at things is there just like one element of surprise to break up the monotony of the layout that's all you need repetition and contrast is the key and make sure you have a lot of negative space and the easiest way i know how to do that is just reduce the point size down and as we progress i'll probably get into the details a lot more than today and i think that's it for me mark i'm gonna hit stop share here i want to thank everybody for tuning in and also for mark and jonah for manning the remote broadcast team here i hope you guys learned something and i'm going to say goodbye to everybody right now okay hey chris yes people are asking what are those plugins uh the architecture plugin people are asking all right you crazy animals let me do it let me share that let me go back in there okay sorry about that i'm gonna find a file here and give me one second mark maybe you can read comments while i go and find a file that can open up so they can see what the heck those little secret plugins are okay okay so for some of you that may not be receiving the emails there's a chance that you might have opted out of the emails in teachable so we'll try to get those to you i think i see some people in the youtube chat that didn't get the request hopefully you guys found this useful again we're going to be doing this um not exactly on a weekly basis but we're going to go through all seven weeks of the exercises so just look out for the request and again if you're not in the course we do have the course available it's um we've reduced the tuition due to the situation right now but for those who are enrolled we're offering free critiques so look out all right uh i can't find my file right now but i'm going to show you what the heck this is it's from a company called hotdoor and they make a plugin called cad tools i'll write it on the screen in a second here okay so those are you guys that are doing architecture design and don't want to use autocad there's a company called hot door and the tool or the plugin is called cad tools let me make that bigger let's switch this back to helvetica all right and i will show you what it does okay so i'm going to pull out all the all this stuff now hide all this okay where are my cat tools okay so you see the the plugins here on my my toolbox here i have all these red dots that's what that is okay so what you need to do is you need to go into cad i think the the document itself now i wasn't prepared to talk about this but you can see all these things that you can adjust and change cad walls etc i need to go and see cad documents here where is it cad tools these are all the plugins here so i want to look at my documents if you're not from here familiar with cad it's computer associated drafting so drafting yeah oh mark i wasn't prepared to talk about this i'll show you to you really quickly i don't think if they're going to dub i think people just wondering what it is and what it does yeah okay so the cat dimensions all that stuff so it is a tool to draw floor plans buildings and all that kind of stuff and if you were to drag something open like this uh let me switch this so you can see it there's actually dimensions on this thing and if i were to go to cad dimensions you can see it but if i need to draw everything in scale like i'm designing a bookshelf or something and i want to cut something right so if i go to cad tracker where is it there it is i can change the dimensions of this right here so let's say it's saying it's 5.75 inches because i've not set it up correctly but let's just say it needed to be a four foot by eight foot thing right so let's say that's four foot by eight foot right now it's four inches by eight inches but i can set up the scale and then i can use this tool right here which is their universal dimensioning tool i can drag it out and then i can drag it out here and this is what i use to communicate with my general contractor and as i keep drawing it'll make more sense because i'm able to control and have very precise drawings and be able to adjust them kind of on the fly like this and you can do little call outs like this here's a call out so so anybody familiar with architecture will know what i'm what i'm doing and it's set up like that it's pretty cool and notice that the numbers are changing automatically for me that's part of the program and they have things to help you draw walls and and it's pretty cool or even to draw doors and intersections and to do an offset this used to be more interesting like before um you have all these other tools but i can offset something and it's you notice when it's offsetting it's saying 0.64 inches 0.7 and that's consistent all the way around so those things are kind of quite important in order to be able to keep keep things uh proportionate versus uh sometimes when you draw a box on another box and you scale it up watch i'll show you what i mean if i take this box and i use let me delete this if i take this box and i use the scale even though i'm scaling up proportionately you'll notice something here what's the difference here well it's longer than it is tall so this part scales out and looks much bigger than the top and bottom so that's where the offset tool comes in handy now illustrator has these tools built in too but that's what it is that's all no secret design plug-ins guys it's just for drafting and that's it any last questions mark i'm tired well we have ten more no just kidding all right thanks everybody i'll let chris sign it off but thanks for joining us submitting look out for the next request for submissions yeah thanks guys i know that could be kind of dry to be studying that type but for the people who do love this kind of stuff i hope you learned something i hope that my next week you guys try and push the boundaries i'm really excited and looking forward to it and if your work wasn't critiqued this week please do not feel bad there were over 50 submissions and there's only so much time that we have one of the reasons why your work may not have been picked is because you broke the rules and it was clear that you broke the rules you used shapes and used lines and all kinds of stuff we don't want you to do that right now there will be a time and place for you to do that don't do it right now and when you submit your three layouts just submit three using the template if you don't use the template and if you submit more than three i'm not gonna look at it i'm just gonna tell you right now all right until next time guys um be well take care of yourself

Channel: The Futur Academy

Views: 158,415

Keywords: futur academy, the futur, chris do, how to, design tutorial, graphic design, how to design, typography, typography critique, typography tips, design tips, improve design skills, how to use typography, typography review, what typeface, which typeface to use, typography layout, rule of composition, layout critique, typography course, improve typography, how to typeface, how to typography, typography lesson, fundamentals, design principles, typography crit, type crit

Id: 4h4RNmemzB0

Length: 104min 0sec (6240 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 31 2020