This week in IxD102 we did a group critique on everyone’s type specimen screen projects. We reviewed each persons using a strategy called, ‘Stop, Start, Continue’, using this critiquing strategy to identify what isn’t quite right and you should stop doing, what you should add or start doing to make it better and what is good and you should continue doing. I liked this technique as it allows us to help each other by offering constructive criticism but also offer support and praise.
My favourite designs are definitely the second and third as I feel the first is more a experimental piece. I wanted to keep both my designs simplistic and not overload the posters with content, using the white space as a feature to my Type Specimen Screen. For my second Type Specimen, my aim was to display as many characters of the typeface in a scatter effect with the O being the main focal point with the title and information. For my third Type Specimen Screen, I wanted to interlock the groove of the G and S to create one shape and use the colours of the London Underground to give it an underlying connection as Gill Sans is the official font of it.
My second type specimen was the most popular with the class, which I do agree. I was given feedback about a number of small things that could be tweaked to make it better.
For my background characters I used Gill Sans Regular and Gill Sans Bold, although I was recommended to try changing them to Gill sans regular and light to make the focal O, the title and the body text stand out more. Another point was exploring the spacing between the K, L, I and P as they are a lot closer than the rest.
Kyle also gave me the feedback that the ‘1882’ in the body text was an ‘orphan word’ and to slightly adjust the body in slightly so other words can align with it create slightly more space between the body text and the inner line of the ‘O’.
My final feedback was to try experimenting with colour to try and see how it may look. It isn’t a fundamental change but more of an improvement to further improve the design.
After receiving my feedback, I applied it to my Type Specimen Screen Design. I slightly reorganised the letters at the top, removing a few to create better spacing and use of white space. Unfortunately, there was no Gill Sans Light on Figma, so instead I removed the Gill Sans Bold and decided to experiment with adding colour to my Type Specimen, to help make the ‘O’ and body text stand out. Also to help with this, I altered the spacing of the ‘gill sans’ title as I thought the space between the 2 words was quite big and altered the body text, changing the size and removing the ‘orphan word’.
I really enjoyed completing this project and learning about the different typefaces as I have used Gill Sans a lot in the past, I never knew the history behind it or even realise it was the typeface of the London underground. I had a shorter amount of time to create this one as I was originally doing Helvetica so if I was to complete this project again, I would like to do more exploring of different designs and themes I could of done and allowed myself to be more creative.