Category: Graphic Design

Graphic design has been with us since ancient times. Samples abound since 17,000 years ago, in the cave paintings discovered at Altamira, Spain. The term originated in the 1920’s, in the Print Industry. It then covered a whole range of activities such as logo creation. Nowadays, graphic design comprises typography and layout, as well as composition. Typography is the theory and practice of letter and typeface design. It is an art and science concerned with design elements that can be applied to letters and text, as opposed to images, tables and other visual enhancement techniques, on the printed page. “Typeface” is a particular design of type, and “font” is the dimensions or size and the weight of the typeface. Popular fonts for graphic design creates interest, and indeed excitement, in works of super graphic design, to turn such pages from the mundane to the exceptional. Examples of this can be found all across the internet especially in branding and advertising. Comparison and review sites utilize font and graphic design to draw attention to a product or service. A look at Hookup Dating Reviews, an adult dating review site found here, illustrates the use of clever typography and graphic design choices playing to the intentions of sex and adult content keeping them on brand and their visitors engaged.

What is Graphic Design?

Graphic designers often describe graphic design as a craft. This is because graphic design combines skill with technical ability, as well as an artistic temperament. As a craft, it creates visual content to communicate messages. typography and pictures are used to meet the users’ declared targets and needs. Interactive designs are used to focus on the logic of the message to be conveyed, in order to mold the target audience to the views expressed by the user. The term originated in the 1920’s print industry, and was used to cover a wide range of activities. This included logo creation, aesthetic appeal and marketing. Images, color and typography are used by graphic designers to justify stylistic choices regarding image location and more particularly the font, in order to maximize the effect. The information architecture of the interactive designs must ensure that the final design must be utilitarian. “Art for Art’s sake” is frowned upon in this line. The graphic design must be married to user experience. The most beautiful designs are those which provide the user with the most pleasurable experience. The final design must be meaningful, usable and economically sound.

Fonts, Anyone?

As already pointed out, fonts represent the changes in size and weight of Types. Fonts consist of the following variations:

• Bold
• Extra Bold
• Regular
• Light
• Italic
• Condensed
• Extended
• More Variations

Type design is the craft and art of design typeface. Traditionally, type foundries employed type designers. Type designers are also called font designers in digital typography. The typeface is a compilation of “Glyphs”. These glyphs represent symbols, punctuation mark, number or an individual letter. Sometimes, the similar glyph may be used in two different scripts characters. For example, the Greek uppercase “Alpha” looks just like the cyrillic uppercase “A”, which in turn looks the same as the Roman uppercase “A”. “Fonts” are often confused with “Typefaces”, but earlier, these were two clearly defined entities. Fonts affect to a large extent how the typographical material looks and feels to the user and the audience. The font must therefore be selected after careful thought, for any printing and publishing projects, as well as web designing tasks.

The Best Loved

The popular fonts for graphic design is chronologically presented below:

• Baskerville (1757)
• Bodoni (after Glimbattista Bodoni, 1790)
• Didot (1784 to 1811)
• Aksidenz Grotesk (Brethold Type Foundry, 1896)
• Futura (Paul Renner, 1927)
• Times New Roman (Stanley Morison, 1931)
• Helvetica (Max Meidinger, 1957)
• Gotham (2000)

The most famous typeface font is Helvetica. Max Meidinger, the Swiss Designer designed it in 1957, and is in wide use even today. Baskerville on the other hand, has been in continuous use since 1757, when John Baskerville cut his own fonts in Birmingham to create a transitional font between the typeface old style Caslon and the more modern but unwieldy typefaces existing. Here, lower cases featured serifs horizontal, & hence great contrast was created. The New Baskerville has now replaced the older version, and is praised universally for its elegance. Manager of the “The Times”, London daily newspaper, William Lints Smith, hired renowned font designer and typographer Stanley Morison to revamp his newspaper, and Morison released his personally designed typeface for the newspaper in 1931. It swapped its precursor, Times Old Roman, and is in use in numerous publications since then till now. Gotham was released in the year 2000. It is an adaptation of the 20th Century American Sign Maker’s “Gothic” font. It occupied central position as the preferred font for the Barrack Obama campaign, particularly using the san serif typeface during the 2008 election. It has been universally acclaimed for its clean, classical looks, with modern application.

Fonts and typefaces number in the thousands in the English language only. There are several thousand languages in the world, so the choice is endless.…

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