This week, we looked deeper into typography, particularly for screens.
We began by looking at the importance of typography and the role that this plays in branding. There are a range of factors that contribute to how a typeface should be chosen. These include how it will respond to different layouts, minimalism, consistency and context. Different typefaces indirectly tell an audience a lot about a brand or business.
A key example of this can be seen in the difference in logos and the fonts used for fast food versus high-end restaurants. Generally, simple sans-serif fonts are used for fast food restaurants so that they are quick and easy to read, as well as highly accessible when paired with vibrant colours. This reflects what customers can expect to get from them: simple and quick food. Mean while, more expensive and high end restaurants tend to use more experimental texts with different serifs, designs and font weights. Instantly, they are seen as more elegant: a reflection of the brands image.
It is vital to be able to differentiate head and body text, particularly on screen. If you were reading a digital book and the title and chapter numbers, body text and page numbers were all the same font, weight and size, wouldn’t it be quite difficult to follow and understand? This is why it is vital to be able to identify what is a heading and what is body text in the design process.
BBC Reith is the font that BBC use. This font was specifically designed with accessibility in mind, as BBC has such a large audience so want to ensure that their media is readable for as many people as possible. Although seeming similar to many pre-existing fonts, BBC Reith has some seemingly small characteristics that play a huge role in making it more accessible: for example, as many people get ‘b’ and ‘d’ confused, they designed it so ‘b’ does not have a serif and ‘d’ does.
A key characteristic of BBC Reith and creative choice from it’s designers is that it has a wide range of variants. There is a sans-serif and a serif version, bold, italic as well as countless combinations of these. This allows for the BBC to use one font but be able to vary it.
During our lecture, we were given a choice between two books- Frankenstein or War of The Worlds- and tasked with designing a digitalised book design for it. The aim of this was to illustrate how we would lay this out and show a difference between head and body text, choose typefaces and capture show the general vibe of the book in our design. Purely from personal preference (and time of the year) I went with Frankenstein. We used an iPad Pro 11” frame in Figma for this.
To determine the font size I wanted to use, I used Typescale. This allowed me to clearly visualise the differences in font size and choose sizes that will work well in harmony together.
For the main heading texts, including the book title and authors name, I chose the font Bona Nova SC. This font is unique as it shows every letter with their capital design, just varying sized. Naturally, this typeface looks quite bold, so I chose regular weight for these.
For the chapter number and main body text, I went with Halant as my chosen typeface. This has an authentic feel with clear serifs, but is not as intense as Bonn Nova creating a a clear differentiation between heading and body text.
