Skills: Concept development, research, graphic design
Software: Adobe Illustrator
Fonts play a vital role in the mood designers wish to portray. There are typefaces that are bold and elicit strength, and those that are minimalistic and evoke softness. There are also those that we can all recognize and may feel annoyed with after overuse— I’m looking at you Comic Sans and Papyrus.
Because fonts have been around for decades, it’s easy to cling to our favorites when writing or designing. A font I’ve personally been leaning toward for about five years now is Futura. Created by Paul Renner in 1927, Futura is a versatile and elegant font that feels timeless. While I first began using Futura because it was my department’s font of choice, I’ve since begun using it on my own because it helps me create modern and clean designs. Its design is based on simple geometric forms— triangles, squares and circles— giving it a refined and tasteful look.
As a way to frame my enthusiasm for the font, I created a Type Specimen. A specimen’s job is to feature a font and highlight how it can be used in various ways. Typically, one uses these as examples when proposing a font to a client.
When creating my Type Specimen for Futura, I wanted to keep its geometric forms as the star of the poster, which is why I featured its capitalized and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols as a right angle on the top right hand corner. I also used the curvature of the U’s to guide the kind of Futura fonts one can find and chose those colors because the neon tones give off a futuristic vibe.