OUGD505 - Studio Brief 02 - Type Developments

Starting to digitally develop ideas, the use of type within the posters was the first point of call. As shown in ideas sketches, it was decided to place the WWF logo in the bottom left-hand corner of the page so that it would not be distracting of the photographic image which would be used as one of the main visuals of the poster. This has been accompanied with a short passage of text composed of some of the most shocking facts on paper wastage found during the initial research stage. Three variations of this text have been composed, one with a short, sharp statement separate to the main passage, one with a bolder heading to clearly state what the poster aims to communicate, and another with the heading but the smaller statement has been added to the end of the passage. Type used for this is Helvetica Bold and Regular, the typeface which WWF specify in their brand guidelines to be used for all material, chosen for its clear characteristics that help in accurate communication of information.

For the larger statements of text, many variations were also produced. Initially, it was thought that the statement could be 'One edition = 75,000 trees', a bold statement which would work with the use of photography and get the audience thinking. The decision was to keep this in lowercase characters, something else inspired by the WWF brand guidelines which states that the use of all-caps should be avoided. Instead, the statement uses the typeface Helvetica Bold to make it stand out against the image. The spacing between each piece of text and the equals sign was also experimented with, making the space larger since it was thought the initial, default spacing felt too cramped together.

This design was also experimented with in substituting the equals sign for the physical word, however it was felt that this made the statement too square and bulky in shape.

The next set of developments looked at taking the equals sign out of the equation altogether since it was starting to feel out of place on the page due to the size difference compared to the text and created too big of a gap of white space between the words. The use of full stops in these developments was thought to make the statements more punchy and impactful. Again, spacing between the two has been manipulated to see what could potentially work better.

In the final set of developments, it was decided to try a new statement - '75,000 trees. Is it worth it?' It was thought that this would work better than the previous to get the audience to think about the poster as a whole, linking the text to the image, and making them think for themselves "is it really worth it" and how they can make a change.

Text in all these developments have been left-aligned in order for better reading and understanding since this is the natural direction in which text is read. It also means that the text, although overlapping the image, would not distract the image took much, particularly the centre point which is usually the main focus of an image.