Nofi dot org » typography

Lately I’ve been musing about the importance of typography in design. For me, the choice and relationship of font families is key to both the visual style of an individual project and the overall brand identity of the organization. Just like art and photo direction, color palette, arrangement & page layout, and ink & paper selection, typography is an essential element of visual communication. For me, typography is content.

After a year and a half of developing and tinkering, I think I’ve arrived at a style sheet for my work projects that’s expressive, flexible and focused. Above are examples and below a list of the main type families in my tool box:

Gotham – An excellent geometric sans serif based on the disappearing architectural lettering around New York City, it was the winner of our short list (which included Avenir, Helvetica Neue, Univers, Verlag and Whitney) to replace Franklin Gothic more than a year ago. To me, it conveys both old-world craftsmanship and new-world sophistication. I tend to use its many weights for display headlines and occasionally for body copy. BTW, it’s amusing to see Gotham get some notoriety as the signature font for Obama’s presidential campaign. I’ve also noticed it starting to show up in commercials and network news graphics.
Archer – I used to find little use for slab serifs, but this recent addition is a nice bridge between sans and serif. To me, its numerous weights range from lightness to solidity. I’ve started using it as an accent for headlines and subheads.
Garamond Premier Pro – Mostly for body copy and as a serif subhead alternative, this conveys to me tradition and readability above everything else. Another favorite is Caslon, but I haven’t had much occasion to use it.
Gotham Condensed – Very readable in smaller spaces, I use it for call-to-action statements and tabular data.
Bodoni MT (not pictured) – Reminds me of mid-century modernism, I use it as a more playful and less stuffy serif alternative to Garamond for short blocks of text.

You can view more examples of my recent work on Coroflot.

Processing: Random font test 03

Jeffrey Melton — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:00:28 +0000

Random font test 03 is my first foray into using text functions in Processing. Yes, I’m still working with procedural code. Eventually, I hope to get my head around true object oriented programming (OOP) for more interactivity and generative art goodness. Above and below are a few stills (click to enlarge), and hereâ€™s a short movie of the results (1.25 MB .mov), also on Vimeo.

I

Jeffrey Melton — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 19:07:33 +0000

Working on a long-term design plan and identity system at my current job has rekindled my love for typographyâ€”from the historical to the contemporary. Below are some of the resources which I’ve found useful: