A6 Evaluation

The A6 assignment was split into two tasks, a presentation on a typographer, and several timed typography tasks.

Presentation

I was chosen to create a presentation on a typographer named Zuzana Licko, The first part of my research brought me to the Émigré website, from this site I learned quite a lot about her, it mainly spoke of her typographies that were published in the Émigré Magazine, and told that she and her husband were the co-founders of the company.

I then stumbled upon an interview that Zuzana did in 2004, it included the most popular font, parts of her relationship with Rudy Vanderlans and parts of her past, I took notes of what I thought were key points, and what I could use in my presentation.

Once I had all the information I needed on Zuzana’s Background and her work, I developed a template for the presentation, all I included was a line on each page that the title went on and an image of Zuzana on the front page.

After the first practice presentation I realise that I had a lot of work to do on it, I dint include the Type Anatomy at that moment, I was still getting more information about the fonts, so I decided to do a font comparison of ‘Base Monospace’ and ‘Base Nine Twelve’, and another comparison of ‘Matrix II’ and ‘Matrix II Display’.

And I also decided to a page that just explained the anatomy of 3 typefaces. The content of the presentation was now complete.

Now had to find and image to put onto my presentation, one of the fellow class mates who were doing the same typographer as me unfortunately was ill so I had no idea of what image he had used, so really I could pick any at all.

I searched high and low for an image, I eventually found an image of her on a font site, originally the image had Rudy and Zuzana, I had to crop it down, but while I was at it I decided to attempt removing the background, I read the help files in Photoshop CS2 and found that the magic wand tool could do this. The process did take a while but eventually I got it done.

The handout was pretty straight forward to make, place the same image I use on the presentation into the page, make sentences out of the facts I had used on my presentation and add some useful links. I also place Zuzana’s two most famous fonts on the bottom of the page.

Once all the content was placed into the presentation, I felt liberated, but I still sensed that it wasn’t finished, I couldn’t understand it, I had everything placed with it, then it came to me, I needed to ad could to it, I looked too bland, I needed brightening up, I decided to change it to a cream colour, although, I had to carefully colour in the picture of Zuzana as well.

I was nervous on the day of my presentation, mind you, it would be strange if I wasn’t worried, I knew exactly what I was going to say, and how I was going to present it, but I was still nervous, even up to going to the door of Steve’s room I was nervous.

But I so over came this, as soon I started the panic just went away, and what’s even better is the presentation lasted exactly five minutes. The only thing I regret was not answering all the questions right, but I’m not worried about it, I can always get better.

Timed tasks

The second half of this unit consisted of Developing and creating a variety of Typographic pieces within a set time. These tasks came in a variety of forms, ranging form paint tubes, to news paper articles. Each task went through 4 stages, the first of which is planning; I used a single time sheet to plan out what tasks I was going to do, and how much time I would spend on each.

Hokai

The aim of this task was to create a paint tube skin; I had the choice of colour I could use on the tube. I was given the company logo, the barcode, and the first stage was to create sketches of it, and I drew two small designs and one final design. I was given the measurements for it and basically just had to colour it in, this is why I chose to not include this in my work, and there wasn’t much design work in the task.

Vodafone

The aim of this task was to produce a newspaper advertisement, the advertised a job position at Vodafone, and we were given the Vodafone logo and the text that was to be placed into the document. I had to design the layout of the document, deciding where to place the logo, what font the text should be and how it was to be presented.

Jonathan Gee

This task was based on creating a newspaper article for Jonathan Gee, a famous Jazz musician. I was given on image of him and the text that was to be placed in, I had to create the template and implement some typographic skills I had learned.

Grid & Story

This was one big task, but was split into two smaller tasks, the first of which was to basically create the template for the content; the trick was that I didn’t know how much content there was so I had to give myself adequate space that I could use to put it in. the banner that I created was very basic, I wanted to include an image but we were not allowed, it was disappointing.

After the grid was finished, I was given the second task, which was to add content to the grid; I had to firstly sketch two ideas of how I was going to layout the page content. I then chose the one I liked most and sketched it to a larger scale. Adding the text was easy, finding a font to use it was difficult but I managed in the end. I cropped the image and added a quotation onto the third column.

Overall I am happy with both my presentation and with the work I have created in the timed tasks, but o better my understanding of software I will learn more about in design, find out how to get more things working.