Project 08: Walphabet

Evaluation on Walphabet poster

For the Walphabet poster, I was given the letter ‘X’. I used the Express and Star’s Blackletter ‘X’ from the front of their head office in Wolverhampton, I couldn’t find the exact typeface used, but the typeface that I could find that resembled it the closest was the blackletter typeface ‘Old English’.

It was challenging to try create a layout in which the ‘X’ and body text felt as though they were cohesive as integral components of the poster, as opposed to a letterform on a poster with some type.

The body text was 260~ words, so I wanted it to be easy to read else it wouldn’t seem very important. I searched what typefaces are used in books and found Baskerville fit the poster well. After sketching designs out in my notepad and trying out some layouts in Illustrator, it became very apparent that the shape of the body text was really important in order for it to be read easily when it comes to this amount of type. If I were to scale the ‘X’ to fit the poster, it creates 4 triangle-shaped spaces on the top, bottom, left and right. Triangle-shaped body text doesn’t read very well with 260~ characters. It needed to be wide enough to fit at least 6~ words a line and it helped a lot to be justified left. So I ended up deciding that most of the top and bottom of the body textbox needed to be mostly flat, it also helped for the left side to be mostly flat, or at least not at a heavy angle. I ended up moving the ‘X’ to the right and carrying it on over from the left. This created an almost house-shaped pentagon space rotated 90 degrees to the right and adjusted to follow the curvature of the ‘X’, which seemed like a good fit for this kind of poster.

When cutting off the ‘X’, it’s important for it to be still recognized as an ‘X’ and not a ‘Y’ or some other letter, so I cut it off and left about 60% of the left side of the ‘X’, which left some room for the thicker line but it still felt as though it was looking like a ‘Y’ that could possibly be an ‘X’, so I gave about 20% of the ‘X’ to show the top and bottom serifs at the same y-axis so people would connect that as part of the ‘X’, this is also the reason why I used two different colours in the dark grey and red, so that it was clear that this 20% that bleeds into the left of the poster is clearly associated with the 60% of the ‘X’. I first tried to have 60% of the ‘X’ on the right, 40% of the ‘X’ on the left but the ‘X’ was too large and it crossed over, so I thought 20% was sufficient especially with the clear colour association.

The background of the poster I wanted to be slightly textured to give an old feel that the blackletter ‘X’ and the image of the old Express and Star building gave and I wanted to reflect the old history of the Express and Star, so I used a slight gradient and used the Grain texture effect in Illustrator. I also used this on the both lines of the ‘X’ with the building, though I couldn’t find how to colourize the building image in Illustrator with the same levels so I did that in Photoshop.

Something I could do better next time is to try find a more distinct image of the Express and Star image to recognize that the image within the ‘X’ is the Express and Star, especially with the coloursation and the noise it’s hard to see the “Express and Star” typography on the front of the building, so maybe I should have used a more zoomed-in image of the building at least on the thicker red line, you can’t really distinguish that building from any other old building. I’d also look into getting images that relied less of resolution as I didn’t realise that A3 with a resolution of 150 DPI would be so low quality. I’d also try to find a way to make the ‘X’ a little more interesting, perhaps increasing the brightness of the background to create more contrast or by experimenting with different effects or breaking up the ‘X’ a little bit. I found it difficult to get that adventurous with the letterform itself because it would create weird negative space that didn’t fit body text that well. It would resemble another letter too much or just not resemble an ‘X’ enough. I’d also look into more ways to bring the old history of the Express and Star in, it was just difficult to find comfortable space within the layout to do so that wouldn’t look too visually busy and take away too much from the letterform and type.