The Art of Typography: Communicate Effectively Through the Power of Type

1. Introduction to the course: Hi everyone and welcome to my class, the art typography. I'm thrilled to have you all with us. Just thought I'd introduce myself to begin with, my name is Fai Brown and I'm an art designer and animator from England. I'm hoping by the end of the course, you're going to able to type geek like me and you'll have a new-found passion for typefaces letters and ways that we communicate with type. At the end of the course, you'll have illustrated a favorite quote or lyric and use topography to communicate your message. After completing a graphic design degree, which really focused on typography, I worked with a great typographer called David [inaudible] , who taught me so much about this area. Throughout my career, I've always loved working with type, whether that's in print or animation or doing branding. I hope my enthusiasm will rub off on you by the end of the course. In this introduction video, I'll be talking to you about how the course is structured into certain units. But firstly, I want to introduce you all to the term typography. Typography, the art of arranging or designing type. This is quite a simple definition and as we go through the course, you'll see there's a lot involved in this art. The aim of this course is to help you see the importance of typography within your work, whether that's design, illustration or presentations. We will look at how laying out words and letters can help communicate in a variety of ways. I see topography as a visual form of your voice. When you talk, you can shout or emphasize words if you need to. You can pause. You can talk really fast if you're describing something exciting. You can whisper and you can laugh. I look at topography as a way of illustrating what your voice is able to do by changing its volume, tone, and speed. In this course, we will learn how to communicate feeling and message through laying out type and using typefaces. I've structured the course into eight units. The aim is to complete a mini-project and a few smaller ones along the way before we all put that newfound knowledge into our final project. This is a self-paced class. You can watch all the videos in one day if you wanted to. However, my advice would be to take one unit at a time take at least a day or two between each one to really let it sink in. You will notice in the lectures I might use a word like see you tomorrow or something. Take that as a guide for allowing yourself a little of time. For the first run of this course, we started on a Friday to allow time for a weekend task. Obviously it doesn't matter what day of the week you start this on but Fridays are always good, aren't they? Let's quickly discuss what we'll be covering in each unit. Unit 1 is an introduction to typography and communication. Here we are. In the next two lectures in this unit, we'll start really looking at typefaces all around us and what messages they might convey. Unit 2, the fundamentals, history and anatomy. This is a really useful unit to understand the history and some of the technical terms used in typography. There's also an illustrated tutorial, which is in two parts for beginners. You could do the whole of this course not touching a computer program. I encourage hand-drawn type and mixed media. But sure any budding designers, I'd advise you to get Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign. You can download, say, day trials of these from the Adobe website. Then we move on to Unit 3 which is branding. We'll take a quick look at how brands have used typography within their visual identity and their logos. There's some really clever examples out there. Unit 4, creating your own typefaces. This is going to be a really fun unit on creating typefaces in a variety of forms. Digitally on apps and websites, and hand-drawn ones and mixed media. There's also a tutorial on converting your hand-drawn letters into Illustrator so you can edit out color and move them about. Then we have Unit 5, which is the final project and laying out your quote. Basically units 1-4 are acting as a foundation and now we can start really thinking about how to illustrate the quote lyric into a piece of art. Throughout the course, I encourage a lot of sharing via the Skillshare website. This is a great platform to get feedback and advice from others, so please do use that. Unit 6, my type of movie. Now my background is in motion graphics and animation and I've used typography a lot in my animation work and I love all the examples out there at the moment. In your resources, there's going to be some links, these amazing websites, if you're interested in kinetic topography. In this unit I also recommend a great movie, that's all about one typeface and topography in general. Unit 7, adding elements to your final projects. This is an optional unit depending on how you are illustrating your quote but we take a really quick look at color, like color association, photography and illustration. There's also beginners Photoshop tutorial here showing you how I laid out a quote. Then we are in Unit 8, which is the class round up and farewell. By this stage you all want to share your final designs with the world on Skillshare, on Facebook, on Twitter. Get those designs out there. This unit will be a little farewell video and also telling you ways about keeping in touch. One more thing I should tell you about is during the first few weeks, one of this course, I'll be taking questions from the students and answer as many places as I can. Hopefully these will be useful for the future students who take this course as well. My aim is to check in and keep up to date with all your projects as much as I can. I'm really looking forward to teaching you and seeing what you guys come up with. I'll see you in the next video, which is introduction to communication and typography. 2. Introduction to Communication and Typography (03.40): Hi guys, welcome to the first my lectures. So you might be thinking Friday is an off day to start a course, but I wanted to set you a little task over the weekend just as you go about whatever you'd already have planned. First few days of course, are all about noticing and analyzing topography around you, things you'd normally subconsciously take in I want you to take note on. I want you to open your eyes, and just think about typefaces and how they're used. So I challenge you to go today without seeing any form of topography. It's pretty impossible. We're bombarded with typefaces daily, from the moment we wake. Alarm clocks, clothing brands, and labels, the morning paper, toothpaste, shower gel, cereal, milk. The list goes on and on and on. We almost take it for granted. How many of us really take note of what typefaces are used in one? Well, I want you to stop, grab a cup of tea or beer and take note of the typefaces around you. For one weekend, start noticing type, make notes or take photos of specific examples that stand out to you. Type you like, type you don't. This area is pretty subjective and a lot of it will come down to personal preference. Saying this, you will also see as we go through the course, there are instances where some typefaces work better than others do, and then infamous typefaces like Comic Sans that get used inappropriately. This weekend, go about your usual plans, but just soak up the topography around you. I'll also be setting you a mini-project to do in your own time before the final project brief a week today. As your weekend kicks off and you start dreaming about typefaces and letters, I want you to ask yourself some questions depending on what you see, the type on. Why was this font used? How easy is it to read? Does it need to be easily read? What does it say about the product? Do I trust this product? What age group was this aimed at? How does this book differ from this book? What gender is it aimed at? Would I buy food from here? Can I afford it here? Can a typeface have personality? Questions can go on, but hopefully you get my point. It's also a great little exercise to help you realize what you do and don't like, which will inevitably help you in your final project. It'll be great if you could post up a few of the photos that you take over the weekend, make notes on how you interpret the typefaces and the topography. Then if you can all start a little bit of dialogue between yourselves and comment on each other's, this is a great opportunity to understand how other people view you, may be an intended message. Some people might say, does it matter what other people think? Sometimes know, if you're producing a piece of art for your bedroom then that's personal to you, it doesn't really matter what anybody else thinks. But if you want that piece of art to sell in a high street shop, it's very important that the message you want it to convey is universal, and everyone gets that same sort. Always have loads of fun this weekend and don't see it as homework, it's meant to be a fun exercise. Next week we'll start looking at all the other finer details, typeface classifications, and terminology, but for now don't think about any of that and just think instinctively. There's one more video to watch in this intersection, which is your mini brief for 10 words and 10 typefaces. So have fun with that, and I'll see you, keep safe. 3. 10 words, 10 typefaces (03.07): In this video, we are going to explode typefaces and connotations we might associate with them consciously and subconsciously. Here's 10 words and 10 typefaces. What do you think about the typefaces I've used? Obvious? Possibly. Let's mix it up. Now, what do you think about these words? Just pretty mean the same here as in here. Does the typeface change the personality of the word? Are these typefaces suitable for alerting people to danger? Does size matter? I'm not going to tell you that one typeface is better than another. Again, it all comes down to what you intend to communicate. When are capitals and uppercase letters appropriate? Think about historical connotations. Here's your first project. Here's 10 new words; sporty, beautiful, simple, loud, traditional, childlike, ugly, danger, futuristic, flirty. I'd like you to find 10 typefaces to represent each word. Feel free to illustrate these in your native language, just be sure to provide an English translation, as unfortunately, I'm not bilingual. I'll post up some links to websites where you can buy or get free fonts, but there's nothing to say, that's the route you have to take. If hand-drawn type is your thing, try drawing an option for each or a couple, or if you find the perfect typeface in a magazine, rip it out or take photo of it. Just really think about the word and the message you wanted to convey. Then post up in the classroom. If you've used a digital typeface, try to include its names that fellow students can make notes of ones they like. Share your thoughts on other people's choices. This isn't about trying to be clever or finding the core list or craziest typefaces, it's simply about communication. Fancy look at me typefaces are most often not the best to communicate. A sign in the street using a crazy typeface might initially get your attention, but if it has nothing to do with what's being sold or promoted, that message becomes confusing and you are put off. Maybe even try and limiting yourself to two minutes on each word. That way you can't think for too long, and often your first instinct is the right one. Try, ideally before the final project, a week today, and I'll see you next week where we will dive deeper into the world of typography. I'm looking forward to hearing about and seeing your images from the weekend. I hope you have fun and enjoy it, and just start noticing type around you, taking it in, and figuring out what you like and don't like. 5. The Anatomy of Typography (18.53): Hello again. I was going to introduce this lecture using the webcam, but I'm full of cold so I've decided against it. Apologies if I cough or have the sniffles in this lecture. We're going to look at the anatomy of typography and typefaces. It's quite a lot to take in, so I'll save this out as a PDF for you to keep as well and refer back to. If you've used type a lot within your work, you would probably know some of this already, but I just want to make sure we're all on the same sheet going forward because I might mention some of these terms in feedback and future lectures. We're going to start with serif fonts. The serif font has a small stroke at the end of the characters, you can see that here on like an r on the ps. It's usually associated more with traditional typefaces such as Times and Garamond, but many of the more modern typefaces use serifs, where they're bracketed like the Garamond here, or slab serif like Rockwell or a wedge serif like Birch. Most books are written using traditional serif fonts like Garamond, the serifs help form a link between each of the letters, which in turn helps the readers eye flow across a line or a paragraph of type. You could look at probably any of the books you've got at home, like novels and they are probably 90 percent serif font. When it comes to the web and TV, serifs for block body type don't work so well due to computer screens resolutions being a lot lower than print, the detail on the serifs tend to break up and instead of helping readability, they look blurred and they might break up and look a little bitty. Moving on to sans serif, sans serif is simply a typeface without serifs, sans meaning without, of course. The most famous sans serif typeface is perhaps Helvetica, as seen here on the New York Subway. Sans serif typefaces, they're usually seen as headings or subheadings. Serifs are still generally used for large blocks of body copy, like in a book although many sans serif typefaces are perfectly readable. Sans serif typefaces work better on the web and TV with many fonts being designed specifically for the web like Verdana, which you probably all got in your systems at home. Now I'm going to move on to weight, and that refers to the measurement of the stroke width, usually categorized as a regular, bold, light, etc. The term roman can also be used, although this is usually used for serif fonts like Times New Roman. This here, that's highlighted, we can see is a Garamond regular, in the word topography, and Helvetica regular for the word of. This is Garamond bold and also there's Helvetica bold there. Regular weights are generally used in main body copy and bold is normally, say, for highlighting something or headings. Moving on to italics, the first italic type was designed in 1501, and it was originally used to fit more words onto a page in the printing process. However, these days we tend to use italics to highlight something specific: quotes, phrases, or emphasizing a particular word. Italics are usually based on the regular typeface from a particular family but redesigned. In this instance, we can see quite clearly that the ys of the italics version and the regular versions are different designs, as are the ps, you can see the top of the p here on the italic version is a lot different to the regular version on the p. That's the difference between italic and oblique. Oblique typefaces are slanted versions of the regular typeface without any change to the letter design. If I can just click forward, so here we can see our normal Helvetica bold and there's our oblique bold and we can literally see the letters have just moved at an angle. Italics and obliques are often confused, but hopefully, you can clearly see the difference here. Moving onto light, going back to weight, here's a light version of Helvetica. We can see the letters shape is essentially the same, just the stroke width is really thin. Light is sometimes called thin. Condensed versions and extended typefaces, the letters are either scorched or stretched horizontally, but the height is kept the same as the regular versions. Now, I'm going to move onto uppercase letters, they're also referred to as capitals. In traditional printing methods, movable type would be kept in type cases with drawers. Sorry, this is quite a low res image, but you get the idea. The capitals were kept in the upper section. So when should we use uppercase? It's generally at beginning sentences or when naming someone, but we can also use it to get people's attention. Here we can see newspaper headings or no smoking signs. We tend not to use uppercase in a block of text like this. A block of text written in all uppercase letters is hard on the eye and in terms of readability, it's hard going. Using uppercase letters for headlines and subheadings is better practice otherwise, your message could be misunderstood as shouting, and we don't like to shout, especially in emails. There was a case where a lady was actually given a sack because she'd written an email to her internal work all in capital letters, but it came across as rude and came across that she was shouting, and then she got the sack. I don't know that's general practice, but something to watch out for, nevertheless. Moving on to lowercase. They refer to the smaller letters, which are much easier to read. A block of text written in a mix of upper and lowercase letters is so much easier to read and cleaner on the eye. There's more white space and more curves in lowercase lettering, like an uppercase word like EMAIL and write the same word in lowercase letters, email. Look at all those lovely curves in the e and then a, and that friendly little dot on the i. I want to be friends with the lowercase letters, but I take orders from the uppercase letters. That's a few little pointers worth thinking about for your final project when we come to it on Friday. Now, we're just going to move on to the anatomy of some letter forms and typefaces itself. We start with type size. This is measured from the top of the letter to the bottom descender. Descenders, we will get to, but they are like on the P and the Y. They are the bits that come down from the main body, and it's measured in points. In desktop publishing, there are 72 points to the inch. If you're interested in the background to point sizes, I'll post a link up which explains more. But point sizes over 14, they're usually used for headings and subheadings, as opposed to main body copy, which, generally, uses a point size between eight and 12. The x-height here, this refers to the height of the lowercase letters which don't have ascenders or descenders, such as A, E, N, O, and an X. The X is used for measurement. You might ask, do I need to know this? It may all seem a little technical, and I certainly don't want to scare anyone with a lot of techie talk. X-heights are worth knowing about. Generally, the more proportioned the x-height to the ascenders and descenders, the easier the typeface is to read. This is the baseline. Baseline is the line in which to capitals and most lowercase letters sit. The leading or line spacing is measured from one baseline to another. We're going move on to leading. It's an important part of the typographer's knowledge. I'll just read this out. "Leading gets its name from the old school days of hot metal type. Strips of lead were placed between the lines of type. In terms of readability, a good level of leading in body text is paramount to how easy text is to read. If the leading value is too low, the descenders and ascenders start to touch each other and, generally, the paragraph can look a mess and difficult to read. Imagine reading a whole book like this. On the other hand, double line spacing can look clean and cool. The reader's eye takes longer to get onto the next line, hence, their flow of reading is broken up. Not good for large amounts of text. A good rule of thumb is to go between 3-4 points higher than your text size for small body text. This is 21 point type and 25 point leading. More fun can be had with headings, pull out quotes, and standalone designs like album covers." I'm now going to talk about tracking and kerning, which is more about the space between the letters. You can see the difference here between the two. Tracking is the letter spacing in block of type or a word. In this example, I've adjusted the tracking on the word, topography, and the other words so we can see there's equal spacing between each of the letters. Kerning, on the other hand, is the individual spacing between letters. Some typefaces automatically kern very well, but watch out for problem letters like A and V or T and Y. [inaudible] is pretty good, the example above is the automatic spacing. As you can see, I've kerned the T in the Y, and I've also tightened up a few of the other letters, the O with the P. Particularly, the P, H, and the Y at the end I've brought in a bit closer together. Here's an example of bad kerning, and I have exaggerated this for effect. It makes the word difficult to read and disjointed. Try to always keep in mind you're kerning, especially for free fonts that might not have been given as much attention and are widely used as Helvetica. A lot of them are automatically set up quite well, but that some of the freebies aren't. So it's definitely worth looking back and just check before you finalize something. Now, I'm just going to have a quick look at some of the terminology used when describing letter forms. The two most common terms are ascenders and descenders. As we can see here on the H and the Y of typography, ascenders rise above the x-height and the descenders drop below. Some other terms we might encounter are the apex, where the strokes of the letters meet at the top. Prime examples here being the capital A of anatomy. The crossbar, which is the horizontal line connecting two strokes, examples would be on the capital A that we see here, and also H. The ligature at the top there on the word, the, is a special character within a font where two letters are joined together. You'll usually find these in glyphs. So in Illustrator, to find these characters, you'll go to your top bar and click on "Type", and then you'll see an option for glyphs. Here we see the T and the H joined. Other examples might be a A and an E and a FF. I wanted to show you these characters. As in some fonts, they are little works of art in themselves and can really add something special to a design, used in the right instances. Moving onto counters, we can see on the O of anatomy, it is an enclosed area within a letter. Here we see it in the O, and also the A and the E and the G. This is different to the bowl, which is the round curve or oval, seen here in the G, and also the P. Here on the R of typography there is an ear, which is the little top poking out. You could also get them on the Gs. Finally, the stem, which is a vertical element of the letter. You can see that quite clearly on the P of typography. I'm quite concerned about overloading you guys, so these are just a few of the words I might mention in the course and worth giving feedback. Don't worry if it's too much to take in right now, you'll have this as a document to jump back to, if you need to. Okay. We're going take a quick look at ampersands. An ampersand is used as a shortened version of the word, and. It originates from a ligature of the letters E and T, et, which is Latin for and. Then some of these examples you can see that more clearly. Like the center one, which is a typeface Trebuchet, that's quite a good example of the E and the T joined together. There's some great examples of ampersands out there, and there's even a typeface called Coming Together, which is a collection of ampersands designed by many designers and typographers, with all the proceeds going to charity. It's worth checking out. Just search for Font Aid and you should be able to see it. I'm just now going to quickly go over some typeface classifications with you, which might help when you're searching for typefaces. We've gone over serif fonts. Here you go; typeface classifications. So we've gone over serif fonts. Here's an example of slab serif typeface, which is also sometimes referred to as Egyptian. You can see that this uses block-like serifs. Stencil fonts have the appearance of the old plastic stencil as we used to use as kids, no doubt. Script typefaces use letters that are joined. These can be difficult to read in body copy, so they are generally used for headings, invitations or a single word, like on an album cover. Handwritten typefaces that have the appearance of being hand-drawn. We're going to be creating our own later on in the week and, no doubt, having a lot of fun with that. Blackletter, this is also known as Gothic script and has been used since the mid 12th century. It was also the very first metal type used by Gutenberg, as we mentioned in the history of typography. Today we rarely see this as body text as it's difficult to read. It's usually safe for newspaper titles like The New York Times or The Telegraph or rock bands, like Motorhead, and a lot of German beer brands as well. Sans-serif we spoke about. I just wanted to show you a few examples of different sans-serif categories; round, simply have rounded edges to the letters; geometric are made up of geometric shapes. Here we can see the O in geometric is a perfect circle, and the Es and the Cs use part of a perfect circle. These are good examples of geometric typefaces, essentially Gothic and Futura. Monospaced is actually a slab serif font, but usually set in the style of an old typewriter such as Courier or American Typewriter. Monospaced letters are all the same width, so you can see the I here is the same width with an N, which would rarely happen with other typefaces. Finally, we have decorative fonts, which are generally used in headings, on posters, album covers or used to capture the attention by drawing people's eyes to something, hopefully, beautiful. Overuse of some decorative fonts can be too much. They can be hard to read and, instead of looking beautiful, could look a mess. There are other categories and descriptions used which generally speak for themselves, such as grunge, retro, comic, etc. But, hopefully, this will give you a place to start when we come to look for typefaces to use within your projects. Things we haven't looked at are paragraphs, text alignment or laying out texts for magazines. I've tried to keep the information I've given here relevant to what we're going to need to know for the final project. Next week I'll post up some good links with more info on good typography practices that you can always read at a later date. But most importantly, I want you to have fun with type whilst having an understanding and respect for it. I don't want you to get bogged down with a lot of this because it's quite heavy-going. Today might have seemed like one of those boring days at college for some of you. It's a bit like learning how to drive. You have to learn all the theory and take the driving lessons, but once you know what you're doing, it can be a lot of fun. The good news is that's out of the way now, and we are going to move on to the cool stuff like brands, creating your own typefaces, and also looking at animated type, often referred to as kinetic typography. Soak all this lot up and I'll see you in the next lecture. 6. Illustrator tutorial - Part 1 (11.05): Hi guys. Welcome to the Illustrator tutorial. If you're already familiar with Illustrator, then you're probably going to know a lot of this. This tutorial is mostly intended for beginners and just to get you up to speed with some things that you might want to know for your projects. When we come do our projects, you might want to use Illustrator but you might just to help lay out your quote, you don't have to. There's no pressure to get on the computer, love hand-drawn type and go down that route if you want to. I'm just hoping this tutorial might help you further along with other projects that you might want to do. If you don't have Adobe Illustrator you can download a 30-day trial from the Adobe site. This is a great time period to have a play, take on some other online tutorials specifically on Illustrator and decide if it's worth investing in for you. Okay, so let's get started. What we're going to do is open up a new file. Once we've opened up our program, we're going to go to File, New. Now, this would be your custom settings wherever you've probably had your last project open as. I'm going to change it because I want the width to be 10 inches and the height to be eight. You change the measurement values here if you want to work in pixels or centimeters. Let's stick with inches. Here is the orientation. You can make it portrait or landscape. I've got landscape highlighted and I'm going to stick to landscape and I'm going to name it. I'll just name it tutorial. This doesn't automatically save it and when you go to Save, that's when you can change the name. You can do anything you want with it. You don't have to put a name in at this point. We've got a new blank canvas to play with and this is your Illustrator workspace. Your workspace might look a little bit different to this depending on how got it set up. If you go to Window, Workspace there's quite a lot of different options. You can even save your own workspace once you know which things that you use most of. For me, it's color and type. Here is my tools. I've got my text tool, I've got a Bezier tool here and I've got erasers, boxes, lines, gradients, there's lots. There's so much to Illustrator. I can't go through all with you at the moment and it probably blow your mind a little bit, so I'm just going to keep it simple for what you need to know for the purposes of the project. So over here, we've got colors. We're going to work in RGB. If you just click on this little arrow here, you can change that to Grayscale, CMYK. Actually, I think we're going to work in Grayscale it will be easier for now. Here is your fill color, so I merit my fill, which means if I was to draw a circle, my circle would be white and this is my stroke, it means the outline of the circle will be black. To show you, I will draw. If I want to change that color, I can just go into RGB and make that blue. If I want to change the stroke color, I'm going to click on that to make the stroke come forward and I'll change that to deep red, which looks pretty horrible. We don't need to know that right now. What else have we got here? We've got my brushes. I've got stroke, which is still on the circle. I could have made that lot bigger here. What I don't have down here is my text tool which would be quite useful so I'm going to go to Window, Type, Character and here's my little box for character. I'm just going to drag that into the sidebar so I can easily get to my character, which includes a list of all my fonts, which I've got too many off, the weight of the font, here's the size. This the leading which we spoke about. If we go here, we can go Show Options. There are some other options here which I'm not going to get into because I don't want to over complicate things and I'd probably encourage you to not use these at the moment anyway. So yeah, let's ignore them for the time being. Lets start typing. I'm going to select my text tool over here which is the T and then I'm going to type the word typography. Just select the word you can grab your cursor, which means you can move it around. You can also adjust the size of your font here. In my workspace, I've also got it up here but you might not have that, so that's quite a good size. If I want to adjust it even more, if I press Shift and select the corner, that will proportionally change the size of the font of the typeface for me. If I don't press Shift, horrible things can start happening like this. This is not good practice. Don't do that. The typeface is intended to work in a certain way. As you can see, if I was to just make that condensed myself or widths of the stems against these bits just all go wrong, so just try not to do that. Just keep it as it was intended. Now, I'm going to change this to Adobe Garamond and I'm going to make that italic here. But I want the graphene bit to be regular, so if I grab my cursor and just drag that across. I can change that bit to make that part bit regular and this bit italic. Now, I'm going to move on to write the word anatomy and by selecting the text again, anatomy, and it automatically remembers the font that I used last, which is Garamond. Now, I'm not sure which one I want to use on this, but I don't want a Sans Serif font. I'm now going to go to Type instead and Font and that's going to help me look at a preview of all the typefaces and what they look like and now, I've got way too many to look through. That I'm going to go for Helvetica. I'm going to go bold. I'm going to just adjust that size down a little bit there. Now, I just need a few other elements to this. I need the word, of, and I need the word, the. One way of doing it is just selecting this text and then I can copy and paste which on a Mac is Apple C and Apple V. On a PC I think it's Ctrl C, Ctrl V, but it will always give you the shortcut over here. So I'm going to copy and paste that word and now I'm going to change this to select that and I'm just going to make of. I'd like of to be regular instead of bold and make that smaller and, the, I want it to be in the same typeface as typography so I can copy that one again and just change those to key and make that slightly smaller as well. We're there, we're ready with our type. Now, I'm not against it, I want to say, but black text on white is quite harsh, so I'm going to adjust this in my color. As we're just working in black, I'm going go to Grayscale. I'm going to make that 65 percent. Now, the difference between doing up there and in a transparency box is that this is still a solid color, so I just copy that, make it black again. I go to Transparency and make it 65 percent. You'll see that this happens. That's because that's transparent and it's looking through to what's behind it. That can look really good in some instances. You might want to use that, but for now I don't want to, so I'm going to make that 100 percent transparent again and just use it as a solid color, but we don't need that word anyway, so I'll delete that. Yes, now in the previous slideshow, we were looking at tracking and kerning, so this is a good example I can show you now. In my character box here, I can select the whole word and I can up this and this is the tracking. Now, if I was to do it like this, it's going to take forever. I could just adjust it to 100 and yet as you can see, the tracking has been evenly spaced between each of the letters. If I want to kern between two letters, if I just put the cursor in between the p and the h, for instance, I can use this option. Again, that's quite a slow process. The other way to do it is to press Alt and use your arrow keys and then you can quite easily just click through and change. I'm going to adjust that on the ph and bring that y in a little bit there and the time a bit there. We're nearly at the end of this. I'm just going to show you a couple more things. 7. Illustrator tutorial - Part 2 (08.02): Hi guys. I'm sorry about that little break in those videos, my doorbell went. So we're going to carry on where we left off. I just wanted to show you a few more little tricks that we can do in Illustrator that you might find useful. So we'll get back to where we were. To show you this, I'm going to create a new layer. To do this and I'm going to click on my "Layers" thing over here. The other option is you can go "Window", "Layers". Here's my Layer 1. If I turn that off, all the types I've done previously have disappeared. If I collapse that, you'll see that each word is its own Layer within a Layer. So I'm just going to click down here, and that will create a new Layer for me. Then I will turn off the bottom one. I'm going to type along a line now. So if you select your "T tool", actually first we're going to select our "Pen tool" and I'm going to create a curve. So I'm going to go quite simply like this. Now, I select my "T tool" and then "Type On A Path". I'll just highlight my little cursor over the path. That means I can start typing. I'm going to write the word, signature, because this might be good if you're pretending to sign a signature in a handwriting of typeface. Now we've got to find one. So I'm going to go to "DonnysHand" and make that bigger. So as you can see, this is now along that curve. It's not a very abrupt curve. So I'm going to adjust the curve itself by just selecting on that "Point". Here I can play it with the base is, to make that a bit more obvious. That doesn't look too good, but you get the idea. So you might decide you need to use that for something at some point. If you've run out of space on the word, just make the line longer or make the font smaller. To make sure it all fits in the space that you need it to. Hopefully, that was useful. Now I'm going to select another Layer. I'm going to type the word, tall. I will get back to "Helvetica" for this. Now, you've got to be very careful when you decide to change a typeface for any reason. But in some aspects, it's a good thing to know about and it's a good thing to do. But really think about it. Think about why you're doing it. What is it adding to? What is the value adding to it? So I'm going to select that. Because as it stands, this is not an actual object that I can manipulate. I'm going to go to "Type" "Create Outlines". This means I can no longer change that word. I'd have to type it out again, because now it's an object. What it does mean is that it's got drop points which I can manipulate and do things with. So for instance, in the word, tall, there might be an instance where you need to adjust the height if that helps. It might be part of an illustration. You do something on the top of it and it just adds a bit more value and a bit more fun to something. I'd be very careful about doing anything too obvious with type like this whole thing. You got to know what you're doing to make that kind of thing work. A lot of type signers do not want their typefaces to be changed and manipulated. So just think about that. I wanted to show you how to do it, then at least you know. Then the final thing I'm going to show you is just how to import a photo and do something with that. So I'm going to just turn off that Layer, select one more Layer. There's two ways you can import a photo. One is "File" "Place". Then on your hard drive, you can find a photo that you're looking for. Or you can simply just have it open in a folder and "Drag" the photo you need into your Canvas. So here we've got a nice beach scene. I'm going to type letter S, the sea, sun and sand. I'm just going to make that bigger. What I want is the photo to be inside the S. So to do that, I'm going to go to "Type". Having selected my S, I'm going to go to "Type", "Create Outlines". Then I'm going to select both the S and the box by just dragging over the whole area that I'm needing. Then I'm going to go "Object", "Clipping Mask", "Make". With that the photo is now within S shape. Which can be quite useful for a number of things. Turning on what you might want to illustrate. That's that. That's it. I'll just show you one more thing. We've got layers. If you're wanting to create a multi-page document in Illustrator, you can add pages by adding Artboards. If you go to "Windows", "Artboards", you can add pages here. In that sense, you can save that out as a PDF and it will be a multi-page PDF. There are other programs in designs, come out in the last few years is really good for this thing. But I just want to show you that quickly in Illustrator. Then when you want to save your project, just go to "File", "Save As", find out where you want to save it onto the thing. You can rename it if you want to, up here. You can press "Save". This automatically will save it as a, AI file. You might decide you want it as a PDF. PDF would be able to be viewed on most people's computers, whereas an AI you'd have to have Illustrator to view it. So PDF is a good option. I'll just rename this as BEACHs and save. I hope that was useful. Sure, save that. We're going to look later on in the week at how to do hand-drawn type and how you can then bring that into Illustrator. Again, add color and play with it within Illustrator. This is just the basics for what to go for. If you're interested in Illustrator and you know have known nothing about it. There's a lot of online tutorials. I will try and find some for you and add those links up to ones I think are particularly good. I'm sure there's even more classes on SkillShare that would be really useful for you. I hope that was useful anyway. I will catch up with you again, soon. 8. Brands and logotypes (16.43): Hey, welcome to the class on branding. Branding is obviously a huge area to talk about. I'm going to try and keep it specific to this course and about typography, because it could be a course all on it's own. Main thing to understand is that branding is not just a logo, it's all about how a company communicates, behaves, portrays itself, and talks to clients. The logo makes up part of the visual identity that needs to represent the brand. So we're going to look at some well-known brands and how typography is used within those logos. Some of you will no doubt have a bit more interest in this than others, but keep watching because I'm going to show you some interesting ways and clever ways that typography is used which might help you with your projects. Hopefully you're all going to feel a bit inspired after this one. We're going to start by looking at some famous brands and logo types, and then discuss what they are communicating. Let's start with the most obvious recognizable logo type in the world, Coca-Cola. The original Coca-Cola logo was designed by John S. Pemberton bookkeeper, Frank M. Robinson. He used something called Spencerian script, which was a popular writing style in mid 18th century America. The logo went through one year of this before reverting back to the original, with some slight tweaks over the years. The white twist was added in 1969 and reflected the shape of the famous bottle. It's difficult to analyze to a Coca-Cola typeface and what it might communicate as it's been ingrained in so many of us for so long. We know that as brand Coke wants us to feel fun and refreshed, it's mostly aimed at the youth. But does the scripted logo type represent that or do we just automatically associate it with youth, freedom and fun? Because we've grown up with that. The color red plays a huge part too, seen as vibrant, full of life, strong, and youthful. I do think this scripted type absolutely reflects this even though it is perhaps ingrained in me. Let's move on and take a look at a relatively new brand, Virgin. Visually not a million miles away from Coca-Cola, using red as a brand color. Although clearly a looser handwriting and logotype. Richard Branson is undoubtedly grown version for one of the most successful brands with branches in airlines, gyms, money, music, mobile phones, trains, drinks, and now even space with Virgin Galactic. The logo didn't always look like this. Here's the original from 1970, which stayed with them for the launch of Virgin Records in 1973. Not really so much of a logo, it looks a bit more like album artwork. Richard Branson is the face of the brand. So the brand values are and should be pretty much his personality traits. Youthful, even though he's over 60. Fun, positive, daring, and approachable. The logo type reinforces this attitude. Think about how many other airlines or financial institutions would use a handwritten typeface like this. They are usually much more conservative or structured, maybe safe. This long on the text is leaning to the right communicating confidence and forward thinking. The underline again reinforces the confidence in the brand. Yet strangely all the brand values are not words you'd usually associate with the name virgin. Obviously the logo is just part of the brand, but this is a great example of using typography to communicate what you need it to say and not what you might first associate with a particular word. So if we think back to the term words to 10 typefaces, it's all about how you want the word to be perceived and communicated. Let's move on to creating a logo for a whole city or a state. I Heart New York was designed by Milton Glaser in 1977 after having been asked to come up with a logo to sit alongside a campaign to regenerate the fortunes of New York State. The success is perhaps in its simplicity, it's become one of the most copied logos in the world. How does typography help its success? Use of American typewriter and so a typeface could be over analyze, but a time when not many people had home computers, the typewriter was the alternative. People we're familiar with these typefaces making the logo accessible and inclusive. Typing with a typewriter was essentially permanent. There was no wipe or [inaudible] there was tippex but that left a nice white bump. I'm saying that using a typewriter from how to include the viewer along with the word I. So you read it and you're immediately involved. You're telling yourself you love New York and you will always love New York. Well, I do. I visited and I came home with a t-shirt and a bag telling everyone else I love New York too. Another city with famous branding is London and the London Underground. The typeface was commissioned during World War I by Frank Pick. He was keen to produce a corporate identity for the Underground. Edward Johnson designed the typeface with some assistance from his student, Eric Gill, who designed Gil Sans. In terms of its form, this is quite a beautiful typeface. Perfect circle for the O, and a rounded dot for the I's and J's. Edward Johnson was a trained calligrapher and that maybe shows in this design or be it Johnson's typeface is very structured. The typeface Underground or logo are now synonymous with London and any souvenir shop like I Heart New York brand. Johnson's typeface was used throughout the Underground on signage, posters, and obviously the trains. As a brand it unified all the stations from one edge of London to the other. Most importantly, almost 100 years on still does. The typeface has gone through a few changes and redesigns, but it's essentially the same. This is a good example of timeless design. When using type in your work try to think what shelf-life your design needs. Does it need to be on trend of the moment in fashion, or does it need to be timeless? Or can it easily move with the times if it needs to. This would depend a lot on what you are designing Here who you are designing for. Fashion trends and textiles tend to move on quite fast, while designing a logo for their a law firm, they probably want to be updating every three years. We're now going to look at some logos, well-known logos that use type in really clever ways. Let's start with FedEx. You've no doubt seen the logo before, but now let's concentrate on the E and the X. Now look at the negative space between the letters. It's a simple arrow. The arrow signifying motion from one place to another. I love this logo mostly because it's not immediately obvious. The designer Lindon Leader could have made it more obvious, that the subtlety suggests the confidence. If you search best logos on Google, FedEx always comes up. Hence it's become a talking point. If a nice big arrow was placed in a negative space we wouldn't need to talk about it. Now let's look at amazon.com. After a few less successful logos, this was designed in 2000. Another arrow communicating delivery, but this time picking out the letters A to Z, Amazon sells pretty much anything from A to Z. As if this wasn't enough the arrow also forms a smile, hoping we're all happy customers. The beauty of this logo is perhaps again in in its simplicity, the A and the Z could have been made bolder or take on the orange color to make it more obvious, but great design is not always in your face and obvious. Think about this when you come to do your projects. Here's another clever logo designed by Herb Lubalin from Mother & Child magazine. A magazine that was never actually published, but this still goes down as one of the best logos. Using the ampersand to illustrate a baby within the O, representing the womb perhaps, it's a bit of a stroke of genius. Herb Lubalin has designed some other clever logos too, like this one for Families publication. Again, it's really simple, just very clever. I'm going to show you one more brand logo now from Unilever. Unilever is a massive brand with many products to its name. Each of the 24 icons forming the shape of the U represent their products from hair for shampoos to ice cream. I know a lot of you on the course are surface pattern designers, and I think this logo is a perfect example of how typography and pattern design and illustration can quite happily all work together. I'm now going to show you some of my work. I thought it might be about time you saw my working process and how I might approach a branding project. It can be quite interesting to see how other people work. It might not always be for you, but you might get some little tips from it that you think, "Yeah, that could work for me. I'm going to try that." I'm going to share my process for a branding project called Scarlet Knight Hairdressing. Now, to begin with, I read a debrief quite a few times, digest it, then if I've got any questions for the client, I'll shoot them back straight away and get those cleared up before I go down any route design-wise. After that, I would sketch out a really rough spider's web, so illustrated here. You can just see there's a few different key areas I look at visually and keywords that clients might have told me, who their target market is, lots of different things, and depending on the enormity of the branding project, those spider's webs can get quite big. This one was quite small and quite local, so that was quite nice. Then I sit on the sofa, I watch TV, and I talk to my husband, and I get my sketchbook out. Now, that might not sound very professional, but that's how I like to start off these projects, because I quite like to start them off by not overthinking about things, just doodling, seeing if anything comes up naturally. If that doesn't work, then I have quite a few other examples of ways to get some inspiration going, because big ideas rarely happen when you're sat in front of a computer. Here's few things. Go for a walk, go to the gym, brainstorm with friends, it doesn't matter if they're design friends or not. Any friends can offer some advice on things. At the end of the day, most of the time, those might be the target market that you need to appeal to. Sometimes I take a nap. How many big ideas have you had just as you are drifting off to sleep? Then you say, "I'm going to remember that in the morning," and you forget. Sometimes, just in that moment where you're going off to sleep, something will pop up. So keep a notebook by the side your bed and write it down quickly. Yoga is a great one, maybe going for a drive. Just try and switch off. Sometimes stop thinking about a problem, then a solution might appear. Don't think that sitting front of a computer is always the answer. So I'm sat on the sofa and I start off by drawing lots of shields. Now, I might not necessarily use these shields, but they're in my head because of the word knight. I always feel like I need to get any ideas like that out just to clear my head for other ideas. Then I'll start doodling S's, and some K's, and some hair related items like hairdryers and scissors, seeing if anything happens. Then I had a light bulb moment. The S and the K could be worked into a pair of hairdressing scissors. Once I have some idea, I work it up and illustrate it to see if it works with the logo, and with some tweaks to the shapes and strokes, we have a clever little logo. My client already had a typeface in mind, Le Havre. It's a great typeface, so I had no need to try and dissuade them against them. But if a client does suggest using an unsuitable typeface, I'll have no qualms or issues in telling them, and you shouldn't either, as long as you clearly state your reasons, your client should respect that and see the reasons that one typeface might not be suitable for their needs or their message. Say your client has a fleet of 100 lorries and they come to you with a typeface which is really delicate and thin. That might not be appropriate on lorries. It might not be read very easily and lorries are a great way of advertising your company. Another thing might be that it's a financial institution and they suggest something akin to Comic Sans, and you need to politely say to them, "Well, that's typeface might not be suitable as it's associated with a child's handwriting and as a financial institution, we should probably set the bar a little bit higher than that." As long as you give them some alternatives and really clearly stating your reasons, you've got your client's best interest at heart. You're not been an awkward designer. Try to bear that in mind, and that doesn't just apply to branding, that applies to a lot of things. If a client does ask you to do something that you really don't think is working as a design, or an illustration, or a painting, just try and really politely say to them, "Why don't we try this instead?" I've got another little task for you. Don't worry if you don't have time to keep up with these little tasks because I completely understand that a lot of you are working full-time or you've got families, but basically, I just want to set these little tasks for the students that have got more availability. I want to keep them busy until we start doing the final project, but all these things are things that you can come back to at a later date and just have a play around with. I want you to take a photo of something that's branded. It could be clothes, beverages, food, electrical goods, anything. Just take a picture of the logo and post it in the classroom and discuss. Not like we did at the weekend to begin with, but this one, just concentrating purely on brands. Also, I want you start thinking about colors and what do they say about a product, like we discussed with Coca-cola. Color is another massive area for discussion and as this class is on typography, I don't want you to feel overwhelmed with information, but color does play a big part in visual communication. We'll talk a little bit more about that next week. I'll post a link to my Pinterest board, Logos, which has some other good examples in, some type of graphic, some more logo marks. There will also be a few examples of inforgraphics showing different colors used in visual branding and also suggestions of what that might communicate. That's the end of the branding class. By now, I'm hoping that you're noticing typography all around you and you're really starting to analyze it subconsciously. When we start our project in a few days, you're going to be in a really good place to think about the message that you want to get across. Before then, we've got a fun class tomorrow, all about creating your own typefaces, so I will see you then. 9. Creating typefaces (08.23): Hi there and welcome to unit on creating your own typefaces. I'm really excited about this unit, this is where the fun can really start. I'm hoping by now, with everything that we've learned with the history of type, the anatomy of type, and if you look at brandings, that we've seen some great examples of how type is used. What I'm hoping now is that all of that acts as a foundation for us to go forward to have some credit in our own typefaces and then utilize that within our projects. By now, you might have realized how much is involved in creating some type faces. Some typefaces are going to spend years creating just one family. We're not about start designing the new Garamond, but we are going to have lot of fun using some different techniques and a variety of media. When it's used as an introduction to designing typefaces. If you are interested in designing the next Garamond, then I'd like to recommend this book, Designing Typefaces by David Earls. There's a variety of different front covers available so when you search for this, it might look a little bit different. But this isn't so much of a manual, but it does give you a great insight into typeface designers and the methodologies and their approaches to designing types. This is Johnston Barnbrooke, and this is Eric Spiekermann, and we've also got fabulous font bliss by Jeremy Tankard. That's a little taster. Also, at the final chapter, David shows us how to create a typeface in fontographer. I worked with David for a number of years, and he decided to choose my handwriting to showcase how to create this font, which was pretty cool. How are we to decide if you're really interested in creating some masterpiece typefaces, that where we can stop. Firstly, it's really important to understand letter forms. They're strokes, width, structures, and shapes. A good way of doing this is by copying others. I don't normally condone copying, but this is an exercise in understanding that, so then we can go on to create our own. What I'm going to do is I'm going to post up this sheet in your resources. As you can see, there's lots of different typefaces and characters here. What we need to do is either trace over them or just try copying them by eye. There's no mistakes, as you may, it's just a really good way of understand letters and their forms. I actually found it really, really relaxing. Here's my sketches. Don't worry if yours aren't this neat, I'm a bit of a perfectionist, but I like scruffy as well. Just have some fun with it. Then we can move on to create our own typefaces. There are many ways of being able to do this now. There are a few options for creating digital typefaces these days. I trained it on the iPad using the app iFontMaker. Now, this one did take me a while, but purely because I did make it a little bit complicated and a bit too detailed. But this app is great for beginners and allows you to save your typeface after and download easily for sharing. As you can see, it's quite a clear interface. You can start by choosing a guide typeface if you want to and adjusting your brush settings. I used Helvetica as my guide. You can also adjust certain elements like the descender and descender values along with x heights and letter spacing. Up at the top, you can see all the character glyphs, as well as viewing them as a word or an alphabet by simply typing in the text at this box here. You can also use this to create much simpler handwriting fonts like this when I did called Faye's hand, which probably only took me about 15 minutes. I really highly recommend this one if you've got an iPad. It's not hugely cheap but it's probably worth the money if you are interested in creating your own typefaces. Another option which is great for producing a quick typeface of your handwriting is the online website, myscriptfont.com. You simply print out the sheet, draw your characters, scan it back in as directed, upload, wait a few moments, and the font file is ready for you to download. The whole process took me under 10 minutes. But then I did think I'd try and get clever, and I tried converting a more complicated alphabet I drawn by photoshopping characters into the little boxes. This didn't work. My advice would be to keep it simple. I will post links to more digital options with programs, apps, and websites in your resources. We can also hand-draw more elaborate typefaces. Whilst we won't convert these into physical fonts files to type out, we can still use these within designs. Please check out the next video which is a tutorial on how to do this. I'll show you how to bring it into Illustrator and then vectorize it so you can then edit it and add color, change some of the shapes here and there if you need to. Now, let's start thinking about mixed media. Potato prints aren't just for the kids. In this [inaudible] are designed for a movie channel. I use potatoes to cut out the letters to form the title of the movie season "Killer instinct." It gave me the grungy texture I was after, along with the inconsistency I might not have got with a digital typeface. We can use so many objects to make letters from logo, paper, pastel, wooden block, stamps, stones, ribbon. I'll send a link to a Pinterest board. We have some more ideas, but what can you think of? I've got another fundamental task for you. Again, don't worry, if you don't have the time to do all these little tasks, you can always come back to them. But for those students that do have more availability, I want to keep you busy, and this one is good fun one. What I want you to do is take your initials, mine are FB, and I want you to find creative ways of designing, drawing, or building the letters. They might be hand-drawn, they might use food, just be really creative and have some fun, and then take some photos, share them in the classroom. Also, if you're on Instagram or Twitter, it'd be really good if you could share them with the hashtag artoftype, and let's see if between us, that we could all possibly make the alphabet. Also, keep posting up your 10 wide and 10 type faces in the classroom along with any typographic photos, I'll be keeping up and giving you much feedback as I can. Ask any questions in the Q&A sections. Please [inaudible] up any common questions that you'd all like answering. The most popular ones, I will be answering in a video. Then there'll be a final Q&A at the end of the course as well. Do reply to other people if you see a question that you want to reply to, feel free to jump in and answer any questions. This is called skill share as well as learning from me, we can all learn from each other. So please do interrupt. Next video in is this unit is on hand-drawn lettering and bringing that into Adobe Illustrator, so I will see you there. 10. Hand drawn lettering into vectors - tutorial (08.42): Hello, welcome to the Illustrator tutorial. In this one, I'm going to show you how to convert your hand-drawn letters into vectors. The handy thing about doing this is that we can then add color and edit them in different ways. As you can see here, this is a card I've designed, and this is a hand-drawn letters. Now, it means I can pick them up, I can change colors in them. It's a handy talk tonight. We're going to use Photoshop and Illustrator. Again, if you don't have these programs, you can download them on the Adobe website, on 30-day trials. I'd advise you to do as many tutorials as you can in that time to see if you like it, and then you could always look into purchasing them. We're going to start off in Photoshop. Here's a hand-drawn alphabet that I've drawn for this card that I did. I scanned this one in. If you don't have a scanner, you could always take a photograph of it and then clean up in Photoshop. Handy tools for cleaning up would be your Levels, which is in Image, Adjustment, Levels, or Apple L, and that helps us to control the levels of black, which is useful for things like this because if we're going to make outlines of this in Illustrator, the original needs to be quite dark and quite strong. I'm just going to make that a little bit right up there. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to take one letter so we don't get too confused here. I'm going to select the D, and then go Edit, Copy, which is Apple C. File, New, and then Edit, Paste, which is Apple V. Now, as you can see here, there's a few levels or like hairline and scratches from the scan here, so I'm just going to tidy them up. I'm just going to select Brush, make sure my color is on white and just paint them out. This is my letter, and I think that's going to be enough quality to use in Illustrator now. I'm going to go File, Save As, I'm going to save this as a JPEG, or if that one there, I'm going to save over that one and call it a letterD. Now, I'm going to go back into Illustrator. I've opened a new file. I brought in my color palette that I've used on my other card. You don't need to do that. I just find it as a useful little tip. Then we're going to go to File, Place, and we're going to place letter D into the Illustrator file. It's looking a little bit dirty at the moment. Let's use the live trace tool. Now, if you bring in a black and white image, this live trace option comes up here. There are other options, but I find that default one tends to work quite well, but feel free to use some of the others which are here. Then you go Live trace. As you can see, it's now made it a crisp, clean image. We just zoom up on that. You can see all the lines and now, vectors. We just go Expand. Now, we can see all of our outlines. I'm going to get rid of this bounding box, which we don't need. I'm just going to select that by selecting this arrow and delete. So now, we've got our D. By making it into a vector, it basically means that we've got a lot more control over adding color, changing the shape, and size of it. For instance, I could select that point. I can try it out if I want to. I don't really want to, but that shows you what it can do. Let's select [inaudible] all. I'm just going to ungroup, and I'm going to show you what we actually have now from this scan. First of all, I'm going to drag this across, and I'm going to make that red. Now, I've left behind some files here. I've got the whole of the outline of the D. I'm just going to make that blue, and I'm going to drag that away. Then here, I've got all the inner parts, which would be the inner white lines, which I'm going to make light blue. Now, we've got this. You can see that there's quite a lot of elements that we could be playing with. I'm just going to move that for a minute. I could take this one and I could cite I want this to be placed behind it. If I wanted to bring back the hole for that back here, I can drag this one across and select. Just get rid of that red one in a minute by placing them on top of each other. I can go to "Window Pathfinder", which I've already got opened over here. If I select this one, it's going to make that inner one a whole. Now, I've got my D-shape back, then I can drag that back over and start playing around that. That's pretty cool. Then also, I got these stripes which we could do something with, might decide to select every other one like that and change color, so then you can do something stripy. Then if you zoom right into these, you can see that some of these things start looking a bit messy. But depending on what size you're going to be working at, it shouldn't really matter that much. This one here, you might decide you want to tidy that up, so by selecting it, I'm just going to change that color to the blue so you can see the outline box a bit better. We select the pen over here and select the Pen minus option. You can just select different points and delete some. You just have to make sure that you're kept right on point, or else, it doesn't like it. You can also adjust the dirtier curves it gives you just to make that shape however you want it. I'm hoping that that's giving you a little bit of an insight into how you can use your hand-drawn letters in Illustrator, and then possibly, create something like this for a card. Yeah, it just makes it so much easier to change colors like that. If I decided I wanted to change that now, I can just just do that and it's so easy to do things. I hope that was useful, and I hope you understood everything that I've gone through there. If you're new to Illustrator, then just keep going over and over it because there's quite a lot to take in, and you'll get them in the end. I will see you in the next unit for our final project brief. See you there. 11. Final project brief - layout your quote (05.41): Hello, type geeks, I hope you are all type geeks by now. Welcome to the final project brief. We're now about to put all that new knowledge and passion to use. Everything you've learned over those past few units, have served as a good foundation for what we are about to do, and that is illustrate your favorite quote or lyric. I hope you are feeling confident by now. I'm going to take you on a step by step process of the next stages. Any remaining questions you have, ask away in the Q&A section, and I'll do my best to answer them. Remember to back up any popular questions, and there will be a video with those answered in. If you do feel confident and in a good position to answer any for your self, then please do that as well. So let's start. Step 1, choose your quote. I want you to pick something you really identify with. This could be a famous quote or favorite lyric. It might be a saying your grandma used to say to you or something motivational that makes you run faster on the treadmill, but maybe suggest keeping it under 15 words as otherwise, this could be quite a lot of work for you. I'm going to play along with you here. The quote I'm using is, always look on the bright side of life. Feel free to use the same one if you really wanted to. It doesn't matter. Once you've chosen your quote, then move on to step 2. I'm going to look into word hierarchy. Start looking at your quote and thinking which words need more emphasis and importance. If you're really stuck, ask myself or your classmates in the Q&A section what we think. Once you're pretty happy, start doing some rough sketches for possible layouts. Here's some of mine. I've decided I want always bright and life to be the standout words. They read as a positive message by themselves. Make sure whatever words you choose as main ones don't read as something else altogether, unless you want them to, of course. For example, I got a nice Valentine's card one year that said, "I'd be lost without you." However, when looking at the card from a distance, all I could read was, I'd lost you because of how the words had been laid out. Let's take a look at these words in a very simple layout. Here they are with all the same importance, same typeface, same size, and same weight. Now here's a design, which reads a lot differently, be and without fade out. So you read, I'd lost you, or another here where you read, be without or even one where you read, I'd be you. My point here is to be careful not to give off any opposing messages. For this particular phrase, I'd give all the words almost equal importance, then maybe mix up the typefaces with something maybe sentimental and something more stable and permanent. This is a pretty simple example to illustrate my point, but hopefully you get what I'm trying to say here. Let's get back to those sketches. Have a play around here. Start thinking what might work. I'm not exactly sure what typefaces I'm going to use yet, or maybe I'll end up hand drawing it. But these initial sketches give me a feel of what I might want, something a bit scripted and carefree for my main words. If sketching really isn't your thing, then feel free to play around with your layouts in Photoshop or Illustrator instead. Post your initial ideas and sketches in the classroom projects. Ask for feedback from others. Make sure you get this right and don't rush before moving on to step 3. Layout your final quote. For some of you, this might involve Photoshop or Illustrator. Others might decide to hand draw it or use mixed media. The choice is yours. Just remember everything we've learned about messages and typefaces, readability and communication. Is there any clever tricks you can do within the letters like we saw in the branding unit. But don't try too hard here because it might end up looking a little bit forced. Just see if anything clever comes up along the way. They'll be a final unit on adding color in typography next week, but that might not apply to all of you depending on what route you take. I'm asking if you could try to design it within a 10 by 8 canvas for your art board, and portrait or landscape. This is a good size for photo frames, but if your idea needs a square canvas or something physically much larger, maybe you've decided to paint a quote, then please don't feel constricted. Do what suits you. Go back into any of the previous units to remind yourself if maybe you don't feel comfortable with a certain element yet. Then once you're happy with your layout, we will move on to step 4, which is adding color and or photography if applicable. We will look at this in another unit. I want you to concentrate on the layout and message first before we worry about adding other elements. The brief will be written up in your syllabus for you to easily refer to. Over the next few days, just mostly focus on steps 1 and 2, choosing your quote and sketching out your ideas. Make sure that you use the classrooms and make use of all your fellow students for sharing and giving advice. I can't wait to see what you come up with. As always, enjoy it and have fun. I'll see you on movie night where we will be looking at typography in film and animation. 12. My type of movie (08.00): Hello and welcome to the unit called my type of movie. I've been looking forward to this one because basically this is the kind of work I was doing for quite a few years in animation and of kinetic topography and using type within a moving image. It's really good fun. We're just going to touch upon it because there's a lot to take in, but I just wanted to do a little quicker unit on this one. But we're going to start off with a film that I'm going to recommend called Helvetica. Now this isn't about kinetic topography, particularly it is about the typeface Helvetica. But it also goes in to a lot of detail about how type is used in the world around us and it really opens your eyes up to a lot of things. If you are now starting to get the passion for typography, this film is probably going to turn you into a complete type geek. A little bit like me probably. So there's lots of interviews with famous typeface designers, like Erik Spiekermann , Matthew Carter, Neville Brody Stefan Sagmeister. There's loads of cool people and it runs for about 80 minutes. So really good watch. I'll post up some resources. The links, I think you can download it on iTunes. There's also loads of clips on YouTube if you just want to Google it and see what comes up. That's where we're going to start off with, with Helvetica. But then I'm now going to move on to kinetic topography, which is a term that's used to describe the art of animating type and text. So this is usually done to enhance a message or to carry a message that maybe doesn't have a voice over. So that the text has to do the work of the voice, which is exactly what we're doing with our quotes, and except we are not animating those quotes yet. I'm not going to make you animate your quote. That's quite a lot of work and maybe we'll do that in another class. What I want to get across with this one is just, is going to help you look at your words that you're using in your quotes and the hierarchy of those words and which ones might need more emphasis. So I think with a lot of the examples that you can see in your resources links, that might just help you think more about how to illustrate your quote, even though it's just a static. So as I said, this was my main job for quite a few years and I thought I'd better show you a little taste of one of the jobs I've done. So this is a kinetic topography piece I designed and animated for post-production company called Prime Focus. In terms of the actual typefaces, it's quite simple. I didn't get too clever with the typefaces. It's more about just how they animate together to tell a story. So here is just a little clip. Create, craft, circulate, and conserve content, to enable our clients to engage, entertain, educate, and excite their audiences. We are a global business that has no borders or limits on capacity and can adapt to the constantly changing needs and ambitions of content creators worldwide. We offer a dynamic business model, world sourcing, utilizing our global digital pipeline across three continents and five time zones. Giving access to industry leading worldwide talent and global workflows, and allowing clients to realize substantial time and cost savings. So that should give you an idea of what we're talking about with kinetic topography. The whole of that video is available to see on my Vimeo page and also in a channel called Kinetic Topography channel on Vimeo, which I'm going to post up a link to because there's some really good examples of kinetic typography within that. So that will keep you busy for ages, probably. So now we're going to move on to film and how kinetic typography has been used in Hollywood films and such like. So it's a really good film. It uses a lot of this kinetic type in a way and quite info-graphic topography as well is a film called Stranger than Fiction. It uses some great animation by a company called MK12. I would post up a link to the title sequence and you can get a good idea of what this is all about. Basically, it uses kinetic typography throughout the film to help tell the story line of this guy who he goes about life thinking everything very logically, very mathematically. So the animation sort relay the way he thinks about things and the way his mind takes over. So it's really, really very, very clever just from crossing road and counting your steps. How many times he might use a toothbrush action on brushing his teeth and things so. It's very cleverly done. Other really notable kind of designers in film titles, most obvious ones that we can hop back to in the history of it all is Saul Bass and someone called Pablo Pharaoh. Hope I've pronounced that properly. But Saul Bass was really a pioneer of this, and he's possibly responsible of creating the first title sequence using kinetic topography for North by Northwest. So throughout the '60s and '70s, these guys were more pretty prolific in their title sequence designing. Moving on to more today's big names. Just search for these on Google. They've got some amazing work, Imaginary Forces. You've probably heard of them, and a guy called Kyle Cooper, who used to work for Imaginary Forces. He's now at episode thing called prolog. some great work there. Another company, Digital Kitchen, and again do checkout MK12. So another resource I'm going to post up is a website called artofthetitle.com and this website just showcases some brilliant title sequences, not necessarily all typographic. But amongst them, you'll find some really good examples. So this should keep you busy tonight. Anyway, just have some fun and find out what you like and enjoy your night. Get some popcorn and treats it like a trip to the cinema. But what I really want you to do is in terms of how this is going to affect the projects that we're doing is just really start thinking about the words and how these animation have used the words to create the message and maybe that can influence the way you illustrate or layout your quote. If you are into animation and after effects and you do have extra time, then by all means after we've finished this bit doing animation on it, would brilliant to see in turn. I would love to see any examples of that. So I will see you in the next unit, which is looking at how to add color and photography into your projects. Then, so have a good night, everyone, and I will see you soon. 13. Final project - adding other elements (07.29): Hello and welcome to unit seven, which is you're looking at your final projects and adding some extra elements. So at this point you should have your quote laid out as you wish. This is the most important aspect for this class, getting the topography spot on. But you might decide you want to add some extra elements, some color, illustration or maybe photography. Don't feel like you have to. Your design might be perfect as it is or maybe you've hand drawn your quote and you just like to keep it black and white. If however you do want to add another element, then hopefully this unit will help a little. So we're going to start by looking at color and looking into color association. So parts of color theory like primary colors and complementary colors, I won't talk about so much but I'll post up a pinterest board that has some good examples of infographics explaining that in detail. We're going to start by looking at words generally associated with certain colors. Obviously, there's lots of different shapes and tones to colors. So this is a bit of a generalization, but hopefully it helps you start thinking about colors and emotions they can evoke. So let start with red. Words we might associate with red: exciting, attention grabbing. Red encourages appetite, its used a lot in restaurants, seems passionate and vibrant. Negative words could be dangerous and angry so be careful how you use it. Pink, obviously there's quite few tones to pink. This is quite a bright one that we might associate with some young girls and immaturity and quite playful. More pale pinks we might see as calming. Its often associated with love and romance and being feminine and it's a warm color. Purple is often used by high-end brands who want to get an element of luxury feel across. Its associated with royalty, quality, ambitious. It's also seen as a bit mysterious sometimes. Blue. So blue, there's so many tones to blue. Here's a few words that we might think of. So blue is quite a masculine color obviously the deep blues are more masculine, used a lot in sport, quite technical, intelligent, trusting, honest, can also be quite cold and blue blue a dependable color. Aqua, often seen as serene, clean, spiritual, healing. Often see this a lot used on spas and anything that wants to evoke a feeling of relaxation. Green, again I've used quite bright green here but there's lots of words that we associate with green: healthy, healing, natural, clean, fresh, fertility. Then as a negative word jealousy, the green eyed monster. Yellow, we have always associated with summer because of the sun. It's bright, its full of energy, its happy, quite often seen as a creative color. The use of yellow in big spaces, like if you actually went into a room that was fully painted yellow, that can be quite intense so do be careful how much you use yellow. Orange seems youthful, fun, confident color, friendly color. Orange goes really well with gray actually. I like that color combination a lot. Brown; earthy, natural, dirty, depending on how it's used. White. Obvious words we associate with white: clean, simplicity, pure, clarity, innocence, cold, winter. Grey could be dull, but it's also looked upon as intelligent, conservative, and neutral. Black. Black is one of those which has quite opposing words. So it can be like sophisticated, elegant, and it can also be associated with evil. It's a lot of style, fashion. You always think of fashion when you thinking black, little black dress, guys in their black suits. Associated with power and of course death, depending on your culture. So what I'm going to do is, I will save out that as a PDF for you to download if that's useful to you at all. But obviously you might not just want to add one color to your designs. Your designs might be multicolored or have a color palette. The important thing to remember, that we are using color to help the topography. Don't let the color distract from the topography. A great website for ideas of color palettes is a website called designseats and I'll post that up in your resources. So another element you might want to think about adding is photography. Again, for the purposes of this project, try to make the topography the focus point. So when might you decide to use photography? Maybe your quote is something to do with nature and a photo of a tree or leaves would be the perfect background. I decided for my quote, that I would like a sunny photo behind it to enhance the message so I went for a nice beach scene. The next video in this unit is a quick tutorial showing you how I did this. Again, this is quite a beginner level tutorial so if you know photoshop, you might not find it that enlightening but I'll try to show you at least one thing you might not already know. Then illustration. You might decide that you want to add an element of illustration into your designs. Maybe your illustration becomes part of the topography like Psi Scott's work or like Unilever we saw in the branding unit or perhaps you simply want to add a small element of illustration. Use whatever medium you prefer, whether that's computer programs, the Illustrator or hand-drawn or painted. So once you've decided if you would like to add any extra elements, now is the time to start finalizing your designs and layouts. Post up any work in progress in the classrooms if you'd like some feedback and also make use of the peer feedback sessions. Okay. So I'll either be seeing you in the next tutorial video or once again in the final unit. 14. Photoshop tutorial (18.26): Hello, and welcome to the Photoshop Tutorial. In this tutorial, I'll show you how I laid out my "Always look on the bright side of life." This is quite a basic tutorial and I have kept it quite simple for these purposes. But hope this will just give you a little introduction to some of the things that Photoshop can do. Let's start by creating a new canvas; File, New. Here we've got options, so we can change our measurements here to inches, and I'm going to make that width, eight; height, 10. Resolution, I'm going to keep quite high because I might want to print this out. If it was just for the screen, I could do it at 72 pixels per inch. Because you've got the potential of printing this out, that's why I advise to keep it relatively high. Then we can say "Okay". I'm eventually going to put a photo in the background, but for now, I'm just going to fill it with a color by selecting here and selecting a random color from the color picker. I'm going to fill that with my paint bucket here. Now, I'm going to change the color back to white, and then we're going to start adding the text. In my tools, I'm going to go to my text tool here, which is a nice T, and clicking anywhere on the canvas. We can start typing. Now, this is the font I want to use, but if you decide that you want to change that, you can just select up here and you can see all your fonts. I'm using a font called Lighthouse, which is free for non-commercial use, but if you are looking to use anything commercially, then please do check your typeface licenses. Over here, we can see our layers now. We've got our background layer, which is the blue. I can turn it off and you can see that we've just got the pixel background. We've got our type tool, which you can turn off here. So I'm going to just copy this now because I want to make my next word, which is Bright. I'm just going to drag that into this little overturned paper icon down here. You can see we've got two Always. I'm going to then double-click on this layer. Then that means I can edit it and just change the word, which I'm going to change to Bright. I'm going to do that once more and I'm going to type the word Life. Now, I'd quite like Always and Life to be a little bit smaller, so I'm just going to double-click on them and I'm going to change the size of that up here. You could also use your scale tool. Let's just make Always a bit smaller as well. I'm not going to worry too much about these being in the right positions just yet because I've got some other elements I want to add to it. Now, I want to add in my other words, which I've given a little bit less importance to, which is Look On The and side Of. To do that, I've created little ribbon illustration-type thing in Illustrator. I decided to do that in Illustrator just because it's a little bit easier to edit, if I decided I want to change the shape of it. I'm simply going to just drag over that from Illustrator and edit, copy. I can go back into Photoshop, insert it in as a smart object. What that means is that I can quite easily still adjust the scale of this if I decide that once I've got it in place or want to make it bigger, I could do that and it wouldn't lose any of its quality. I'm going to put this roughly in place where I want it, just up here, and then just click on that to place it. I can just adjust that slightly using the cursor keys, and then I'm going to bring in the other one. Again, just paste that in. You can use Apple C and Apple V. Paste that in. I'm going to adjust the size again, making sure that it was the same as the one I've just placed in. That one, I'm roughly going to want to be placed around here. So we're getting there. Now, what I want to do is I want this y to wrap around the ribbon. So to do that, I'm going to use the map tools in Photoshop. I'm just going to zoom into this area by pressing Apple plus sign. If I just press the space bar, you can drag your canvas around. So here we are. We've got our Look On The ribbon and our Always type. Why I want this y descended to do is just wrap around here. To do that, I am going to place my ribbon layer, which I should name so I know which one I'm working on. Let's just double-click there, and I can name that layer. I'd advise you to name layers if you can, especially if you're working with a lot of layers because it can get a bit complicated if all the layers are called layer one, layer two, etc. Now, I'm going to highlight the Look On The and just press this tool down here, which is our map tool. This gives me a map layer, which basically means I can erase parts of it without permanently erasing it, in case I decide to change my mind. So it's quite a useful little tool to use within Photoshop. Now, what I want to do is just select the Always type. To do that, I'm just going to press Apple and select. Just click on that layer. So it hasn't actually selected that layer because as you can see, I'm still highlighting with the blue one here. But it's highlighted the type and now you can see there's a path around it. So what that allows me now to do is always working on my map layer. You always work in white and black or gray. Just select this paintbrush and I can start painting out parts of that ribbon, which is a really, really useful tool to do. Not just for this, but there will be lots of instances where you might think that could be useful. So then we can just deselect, and you can see that that now nicely wraps around there. I probably should have given it a little bit more space in here. So now I can do because I haven't permanently erased that ribbon. If I just unlock these two here, by pressing the middle and selecting my main ribbon layer again, I can just drag that across. As you can see, it's all intact behind it. That works a little bit better for me. Put a little bit more space in here. We're just going to do that again on the g. So again, select our Side Of layer, create a map tool, and then apple select the word Bright. There we go. Then with the paintbrush, I'm going to paint out the g, and then deselect. I'm quite happy with our placing. I'm going to fix this bit a little bit later. Here we are, and now I'm just going to close down that Illustrator so that it doesn't get confusing. I know that I want my design to sit within a circle. I'm going to select a new layer by just pressing this Page tool here, and select in my Shape tools. If I press down Shift, then that lock it to a perfect circle shape rather than just an oval in the [inaudible] There's a circle, and let's just grab a random color. Fill it with the to Paint bucket. Now I can lay out my text within that circle. It made it a little bit over towards the right. I'm going to select all of these layers. When you select data, just make sure that you've locked those backup. By selecting the multiple layers, I can now drag them all across together. I'm quite happy with that. This is where the fun can begin. We can start playing around with photographs. Now I've got a photograph down here of a nice beach that I'd like to use. I'm going to just drag that into my Canvas. As you can see, that's come up to the top there. I'm going to just make it sit behind that type for now. Now this photograph, if I just zoom out a little bit, this photograph is a little bit of an angle and I want it to be straight, I think. I'm going to just grab a ruler in the guide down here. As you can see that's the little blue line. That means now that I can rotate it and have a guide to work with it, so Transform, Rotate. Now I can just move that across, there we go, and double-click that once you're happy with it. I'm going to move that guide out away, so it doesn't confuse our design now. Now what I wanted to do is place this photo within the circle. Again, I'm going to use my Map tool, but this time, I'm going to do something a little bit different. I'm just going to drag this circle onto the Map tool down here, and that will automatically put it in a circle for me. As you can see, that's what we've done here. Now I want to move this image within it. I'm going to unlock again here, select my image, and drag that up. There we go. Now we've just got the sea on the beach which is quite nice. I'm just going to adjust my levels now. If you press "Apple L", you'll get your levels up and just going to make them a little bit deep and a little brighter. I'm going to change my background color now to white because I want this to be quite airy. I didn't quite grab that. I think the word life is getting a bit lost in the sand. I want to add a Drop Shadow to that. If I just select the layer, and down here, I can go fx, Drop Shadow. They'll come up with some options for me. Now as you can see, it's done an automatic one here. Now I'm going to pick a color from the sand, and then just drag that to a darker version. Then I'm going to adjust the Distance, and the Size, and Spread a little bit. I don't want it to be overly office, I just want to lift it off the page a little bit. That's quite nice, so I'll "Okay" that. Then what I'm going to do is just right-click that, and go Copy Layer Style, and paste up into the Bright Layer, Paste Layer Style down here. Also on the Always Layer. The Always one, I'm going to adjust the color on, so I'm just going to double click again on that Drop Shadow. Then I'm going to pick one of these dark blues up here, that's quite nice, and "Okay" that. We are nearly there. I'm just going to do two little things to make this a little bit neater in places. First of all, I want to adjust these little white graphics I've got coming under the G. I'm going to unlock this layer. To be able to edit it because I bought it in from Illustrator, I need to right-click it, and say Rasterize Layer. That now allows me to pick the color here, and it allows me to just paint those little ones out. Now the other thing I want to do is just a little trick that I use a little bit on photographs. I'm going to click on my photograph layer, which I should name, and I'm going to copy it by dragging it into little page icon again. I'm going to change the transfer mode to Overlay. As you can see, that just made it a lot brighter. Now it's probably a little bit too bright. But what I want to do is just unlock that, so I keep the circle shape. I'm going to use a Blur on top of this. I'm going to blur out that Overlay layer. This is quite a nice effect to use on photographs. Just go play around with the Settings a little bit, and make sure you get it right to how you want it. I'm going to go with that, and then what I'm going to do is just knock down the opacity of that layer to about 50. We can see the difference that's made. It's just enhanced the color without it looking too fake or too effected. Last thing I'm going to do is just that at the bottom, I'm going to write who the quote was said by, not in this typeface. I'm just going to select that, and select the typeface I was using for look on the inside of which was Century Gothic, Bold, make that lot smaller. It was probably set by someone else before I acquired on the pythons. But that's what we all know is always look on the bright side of life. So that's my quote, and that's the end of the Photoshop tutorial. 15. The Art of Typography - round up: Hello. Welcome to the final video. I just thought I'd do a little farewell unit and little bit of a class roundup. So I hope that you've enjoyed the class as much as I have enjoyed putting this together. It's amazing how much I've learned putting this together. If there's anything you think that you could teach, I'd really highly recommend it. It's been a great experience for me. I'm going to be checking in regularly and hopefully seeing lots of your work. But if you want to keep in touch, there's a variety of ways that you can do it. I'll be posting up comments about new courses and hopefully posting up some new student work as well. You can e-mail me via my website, which is fayebrowndesigns.com. You could follow me on Twitter, which is @fayebrowndesign. If you're going to post up any of your work on Photos, remember to hashtag, art type. I'll keep regularly checking for that and seeing what you guys have come up with. Also over on my blog and Facebook pages, there will be some more info about up and coming courses and discount codes and things. So all of that, you can get to through my website, fayebrowndesigns.com. So by now you should have completed your quotes or very nearly completed them. So I advise you to just get them out in the world, share them on Facebook, Twitter, on your portfolio sites. You might be thinking, what can I do with this now? Well, you can print them, you could frame find you can put them on your wall, you could make postcards, you can give them to friends. You might decide that they would look good on greeting cards. I just thought I'd show to you a couple that I did a few months ago. I did some designs and I decided to get them printed professionally. After I'd done that, these were for the Christmas range. Once I'd done that, I decided that I would contact a few shops and see if they might be interested in stocking them. Make sure you put your name and contact details on the back. It's a good way for people to see you and get your name out there. So that's a route you could decide that you want to take. If you do, then please do let me know. Keep sharing in the classroom as well. As I said, I will be checking in regularly and I'm really excited to see your final quotes, and illustrations, and designs. Finally, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the course. Please do write a review on Skillshare and I can take all that feedback forward for creating new classes. Also, if you feel any of your friends would enjoy this class, then make sure you pass on your codes. That's it really. I hope the course has inspired you. I hope everyone's quotes have inspired you and I'm sure they're going to inspire me. I hope you'll never look at type in the same way again and now you are an official type geek. Thanks a lot for joining me in this class. It means a lot. Cheers and bye-bye.