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Bodoni moves away from fonts that are based on handwriting and starts to become more machine like. It is highly geometric but still retains a few naturalistic curves that become hidden in between the hard lines of the letters. They become little treasures that are waiting to be found and give the letterforms their distinctive personalities. Bodoni’s stroke weights are highly contrasted going from extremely thick to lines that are minuscule on the same letterform.
My Bodoni Y has thin serifs that extends from the main stokes. These serifs have no brackets, though. There is no transition from stroke to serif and they meet at angles. This letter also has a crotch where the two strokes meet. It also has an arm, which is caused by the short stroke that comes inclined vertically off of the stem. The left side of my letter contains the stem, or the main stroke found in my letter.
My interest in design started fairly recently. Three years ago I received Led Zeppelin’s Mothership album for my birthday and was struck by the qualities of the packaging. The front cover was highly stylized and embodied the big sound of the music it held. It was a visual representation of the music inside. The only colors used were red, cream, and black. The simplicity of these colors but the way they were used I found remarkable. Luckily at the time I was just starting my first art class in high school. I was moved to start studying art more thoroughly in hopes of one day creating great designs. Before attending KCAI I went on several tours of the school, which included tours of the design building. The posters I saw in the building convinced me that I had to go into graphic design.
The readings support my ideas of Graphic Design, which came from viewing my Mothership album packaging. It also expanded on why the design of the packaging was created in the way that it was. A printmaker that used his specialty to create a design that worked best for communicating the feeling of classic hard rock music created the design. He also gave the design an attitude that would capture the viewers eye and would bring them into the album cover and cause them to become entangled in it, thus combining communication with interesting visuals. Stefan Sagmeister is a contemporary graphic designer that is staying away from the happy carefree designs and is instead going with more realistic designs that instead carry a more serious message. I agree with his use of design to move people toward a better future. Design is a powerful tool that can be used to influence large masses of people.
My find and share is a Stenberg Brothers poster for the Russian film Man From the Forest. The first principles that are noticeable are scale and framing. The size of the large face brings it to your attention as the most important subject in the poster. The framing of the poster cuts off the face, which dramatizes the face by making it larger than the other figures in the poster. The Brothers also used layers as the stem from one of the Russian letters extends well beyond its baseline and overlays the rest of the poster. The last design principle used is asymmetry. On either side of the elongated stem there are two subjects. One is a partial face while the other is a partial body. The complimentary coloring balances each other out while still not being symmetrical.
