Simple rules for good typography

Here are some basic rules to improve your typography across either web or print. Of course, these rules are only to start with, and rules are meant to be broken. But if you want something to look neat, clean and generally well designed they are a good set to follow.

1. Don’t use too many type faces
Consistency throughout a document or website is helpful. It brings unity and one identity. It also makes it clean, tidy and jus basically not messy. A good rule to follow then is to not use more than 3 different fonts in any one document.

2. Hierarchy

Fonts I have used lately

This post http://www.freddesign.co.uk/2009/11/archive/great-thick-headline-fonts/ contains some cool fonts I have used, or tried to use recently. thought I would share, let me know your thoughts.

Hope you think these ones are as good as I do. I have tried to put a number of good free ones on too for those designing on a budget. The fonts are all really thick and great for headlines or experimental typography.

Stilla
I love this font. I know plenty of top design agencies who use it frequently. Its a lovely bold italic font with a real difference. I have seen a couple of versions of this. I have found a downloadable file here, looks slightly different in certain characters but still really cool. It seems to work good in both uppercase and lowercase.

IKEA typography - A question of why?

I wanted to write this post as a kind of afterthought a good few months since the typographic shift we all felt in the world of graphics when Ikea changed their font from a custom version of futura to a standard web based one.

Anyone know what this font is?

Anyone know what this font is?
need to redo a logo and they want to use it...

Good typography in Indesign - bullet points

Hello all.
This post follows a really good article by Mark Boulton about good typography I read (http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-steps-to-bette...), and specifically, how to deal with bullet points. Below are 2 images he gives to demonstrate how bullet points should and should not look.

Great font

I found this free font the other day and wanted to share it. Its called VAL and has a lovely rounded form with curved lines making it really striking and different.

You can find it here…

http://fontfabric.com/?p=585

Its seems to look really good in simple short forms of type. Perfect for logos or headlines, though the legibility is not amazing, but hey, its not really about that!

I also love the way it is displayed on this site. Gives good examples, but also shows the font as an alphabet form in posters with 4 fonts per page. I think this is a really interesting and original way of showing a font. It also directly shows you how effective it is in simple form.

Anyway, hope you think its as nice as I do.

Enjoy.

Textured type, stamp, letterpess photoshop tutorial

Hello all. I always love authentic letterpress type type. You can always tell when this has been achieved and quite often it displays a lovely texturised quality. So today, im gonna try and show how an effect like this can be achieved using photoshop. This tutorial is being done in Adobe Creative Suite CS as this is all I have at home, but all the tools are pretty much in the same place in CS3 and 4 I think.

Step 1.

Making something out of nothing

I have recently been working on a project for a recycling company I would love to share with everyone and get their thoughts. Its still at the developmental stage at the but have been shooting some test shots seen below.

The art of doodles

I have been experimenting with doing a doodle type style for a poster, and although it is not yet decided if it will go ahead yet, I still think its an awesome effect. Attached to this post are a number of examples I found on places like flickr and google and one great advert as well. When experimenting, I found they key is to be patient and have a little faith. It takes a while to take shape. Any thoughts on my effort shown above are appreciate. Not quite finished yet tho.
hope you guys think these are as cool as I do.

Top 5 Olympic Poster Designs

Having recently read about German graphic designer otl aiche and in build up to the London 2012 games, I have decided to do a post about the different designs for olympic posters. This is in fact not a very original subject, but in my research I did find that there was lots of pictures and not THAT much actual critique from a design point of view. So thats what im gonna try to offer hopefully. Obviously there has been a massive amount of designs over the years, so what follows is my top 5 favourite poster designs. Hope you enjoy.

1980 Moscow, USSR