“What exactly is typography? It’s the practice of arranging type in order to convey a message. A painter uses brushes and canvas, paper, or some other surface. Today’s typographer uses fonts and a digital canvas for work that will either be transposed to paper or viewed on other screens.”
https://parisleaf.com/how-typography-connects-your-audience-to-your-brand/
In today’s lecture we covered typography in relation to branding and how it can be used to make a difference in the way a customer views the overall branding, or how it can impact their usage of a product, or how they perceive advertising or other touchpoints.
I really liked this article by Chad Paris about typography in branding. It covers how different fonts have completely different personalities and usages, especially in branding.
For example, a stop sign for example requires a font that is bold and clear; it doesn’t need to show any personality, just be readable enough for a driver to understand what it’s communicating.
However, a children’s brand most likely wouldn’t use a sharp and more professional font such as Avant Garde, as it most likely doesn't align with the values of the brand. They would benefit more from a font that seems fun and approachable yet is understandable by children, who are the target demographic.
In this week’s lecture, we also discussed typography in relation to branding and explored possible names for our libraries NI rebrand and had them critiqued by the class and lecturer to help us settle on a name. This was done by putting them on a Miro board and having our peers vote on their favourites.
Out of my five possible names, the one that got the most votes was Learning Link NI; however, I was told it’d be best to remove the NI part of the name as it would limit the brand, as well as being plainly not necessary.
However, I’m still not set on this name as I feel it may imply a younger target demographic than what my actual focus is.
The second part of today’s lecture focused on getting us used to what typography might imply to a customer or what personality it might carry, and how to apply that successfully to our brief.
To do this, we got tasked with creating a user persona for a randomly assigned font.
I got assigned Cooper Black for this exercise, a very bold font mainly used in advertising, music albums, book covers and more.
It is mainly associated with the 1970s, even though it has had a recent boom in usage in advertising despite being created by Oswald Cooper around 1920.
https://www.vox.com/videos/21294395/cooper-black-pop-culture