Steve's Old-fashioned Ice Cream Parlor

Submitted by ETC on Fri, 02/08/2008 - 23:58.

In design, there two main elements: image and text. The two play off each other to inform the viewer--if one is improperly chosen and ill-suited to the other, the message will become skewed.

For instance, a poster for Steve's Old-fashioned Ice Cream Parlor wouldn't use Helvetica in its advertisement. As we've discussed, Helvetica is streamlined, clean, efficient, bureaucratic--and new. Obviously, it wouldn't function for Steve's store--he would opt for a warmer, nostalgic typeface, perhaps even a script.

Helvetica would function, however, as a typeface for a non-nostalgic parlor that served a variety of foods. It would work just as well for and ad for a chain store, such as Target, or for a flyer posted on campus advertising a used bike for sale. Target aims for the clean, modern feel to inform its images; the bike seller probably used the default setting. In these cases and many others, Helvetica works--the basic, the safe, the universal, the default. As a standalone, it functions clearly and simply in almost any case, but combined with image, it must undergo further consideration before being plunked into the workspace.

Keywords: helvetica | imagetext

"Old-Fashioned" or "Decayed" typography

Submitted by Zach Whalen on Sun, 02/10/2008 - 22:22.
I don't think we mentioned it in class, but I would hazard a guess that the degraded or corroded look is the most common way in which typography can be expressive. I think that's interesting for several reasons, the main one being that it references the letter as a material object with a sense of history as an artifact of its own. So if you print something in a typeface like Stud, it looks like it already has a history as soon as you print it. The words themselves, however, are not old, the letters are. So the history (or narrative, say) is stored in the detail of the letter form.

Also, decayed or old-fashioned type is interesting because of course all type eventually becomes will become decayed or old-fashioned. So printing something in Stud references both the past and the future -- a future in which both the word currently being printed and the letter form will be decayed, degraded and old.

Degraded type is probably

Submitted by ETC on Tue, 02/12/2008 - 22:56.

Degraded type is probably the most expressive type after something such as Old English, or Jokerman, or Chiller. Chiller is especially expressive of its name--it aims to frighten you to the core. It's not so much a history as a story, however; and it is told in the form of the letter, as is degraded type, thus coming laden with meaning.