SANFORDEDITORIAL

This was a web banner I designed for the Ooligan project Untangling the Knot, which at the time was called More Than Marriage. We needed more submissions for the anthology, so I wanted to create a banner that had a powerful image to attract the eye. I also used complimentary colors in the text to draw attention.

For the Book Design class final, we had to write a paper about some aspect of design, and then design the final layout. My paper was on Sweden Sans and national typefaces. Rather than format the essay as a book, I designed them to evoke both type specimen sheets and the corresponding flags or political slogans being discussed in that section.

I printed the type sheet flags as posters, envisioning that ideally they would be displayed sequentially on a wall. The familiar designs and eye-catching colors would draw people in closer, and then, once they realized there was a story in the designs, they would be willing to spend the time to read it, because it would almost be a game, like Where's Waldo. This would help alleviate any frustrations over reading small type or the blackletter.

Some fonts I didn't have available, because they were too expensive for me to purchase, so I used similar, free fonts to give the same effect.

Two of the challenges of this project were to constantly reinvent the type sheet, so that my designs weren't too similar, and to conjure the image of the flags without necessarily repeating them identically.

This was a hard one to make legible, simply because we are not used to reading blackletter anymore. By the time a reader got to this part of the essay, though, I feel he or she would be invested enough to finish.

The essay ended on kind of a sad sour note, which I did not expect when I started researching the question, so I wanted to counteract that some with a dash of tongue-in-cheek design humor.