Michael Rice

I’ve designed two new fonts. Pretty happy with them.

The first two fonts that I’ve designed. The top being a very simple and straight forward Sans Serif and the bottom being a slightly more stylish, featured design.

Now that I’ve got the theme I’ve started to focus more of my attention on well known/iconic designers within the world of type. I’m starting with Neue Grafik (more of a group of artists than a single one). Neue Grafik (1958 – 1965) consistently filled it’s pages with beautiful sans serif type deeming it an iconic and distinguishable piece of design. The infamous type that is Helvetica was a big feature within the magazine. Helvetica is, as everyone knows, the most famous and recognisable of all the sans serif types.

From these two examples of design, I’ll be looking directly within Neue Grafik to gain ideas about kerning and positioning for the type. Segway-ing from this to the next, I’ve been looking at a lot of Paul Rand’s work due to how his work on corporate logos links nicely to my themes within instructions and electronics, making something easy to read and very recognisable.

His most noted work is on the ‘abc’ logo, the American TV network. The logo has been the same (with a few minor changes) since 1962 and really has stood the test of time. There’s no reason to change a logo like that because well, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. From this logo it’s sparked a few ideas in my head involving shapes, something that I could use in order to form letters. Moving onto another logo designer, we find Massimo Vignelli, the man behind the well known ‘American Airlines’ logo. The logo serves two purposes, 1. sending a message about the company that’s easy to read and recognisable. 2. representing what the company stands for.

The logo is easy to read as the type stands out and very recognisable. It also represents the company with the colours being red and blue, i.e. the colours of the flag as well as featuring an eagle between the letters. The eagle is a connotation of America. The logo was created in 1968 and stood proudly on the Aeroplanes until 2013 when a new, less understandable logo was created.

Finally I’ve been looking at the work of Matt Judge of ‘Designjudge.co.uk’. Not so much focusing on type but design in general I’m looking at Judge as a source of inspiration into how type and different objects are positioned and how sometimes less is more. I admire his unconventional website (which has links that, when clicked, bring up a prevention of work), which in someways can be used as a design study on it’s own.

Here are some examples of the Sans Serif fonts that I generally use on a regular basis whenever I’m messing about on Photoshop or InDesign.

So now that I’ve got a solid theme going I’ve decided to snoop around and look at different websites held by major players in the electronic device game, mainly Apple and Samsung. I looked at Apple because in recent months they’ve actually designed a new house font for their use only. Calling it ‘San Fransisco’ the font is simple yet noticeably different to the standard Helvetica ways of their devices before iOS9. Personally, I really admire it as it gives the Apple products yet another push out into the ‘unique’ frontier.

I like it because it’s crisp, clean and to be honest, I’m a sucker for beautiful Sans Serif fonts.

Aside from this I also looked at Samsung and Xbox (noting Microsoft). With Samsung I took a look at the font use within the advertisements of the Galaxy Edge+. I did the same with the Xbox website.

Granted the pictures aren’t the clearest in the world but you can see that, across all the websites I looked at, the use of the Sans Serif within technology is highly common as it mimics and compliments that of the devices it’s used in conjunction with. So obviously, this is the direction to move towards.