- If you can't tell,
I'm not a big fan of showing something
and repeating the message with a headline.
That's just too pizza pizza for me.
It's redundant and treats the viewer
as extraordinarily unintelligent.
I think people are pretty good at looking at patterns
and forms and determining a message,
as long as the execution is clear and accessible.
Take, for example,
a cover for a catalog on recent sculpture.
If the designer presented an image of recent sculpture
and then a headline with the same message,
we have no involvement.
It's forgettable at best.
But the solution by Louis Danziger solves the problem
by allowing the headline to become the sculpture.
It isn't a specific sculpture.
He didn't attempt to do anything too tricky.
Sculpture is three dimensional.
By wrapping the type around the invisible form,
we read 3D means sculpture.
The simple yellow background
and minimal sans-serif typography
tell me that this is about modern work,
not sculpture from classical Greece.
The designer Jennifer Sorrell wanted to communicate
the culture of different Los Angeles neighborhoods.
For the York neighborhood, a largely Mexican American area,
Sorrell integrated actual items from local stores
into three dimensional acrylic letter forms.
This is a great solution that respects the culture
without minimizing or stereotyping it
with a phony looking typeface,
and it ends up being a treasure hunt
for the viewer to identify each item.
When I needed to design a poster
for a theatrical production of Doubt,
a play with a dark subject matter,
I used the typography the blind and silence the subject.
This simple gesture gave the title the necessary hierarchy
and the soft focus image created tension.
We typically don't like covering a person's eyes and mouth.
It feels invasive.
Sometimes, the most minimal move
is enough to tell the story.
By only giving a lower case H a pitched roof,
Michael Johnson makes a logo
for a houseware store memorable.
This is one of those solutions that appears so effortless
that the viewer immediately recognizes it.
And most designers will think "wow, that's so obvious.
"Why didn't I think of that?"
That's a sign it works.
And while I tend to not promote mutating the letter forms,
sometimes a little skilled manipulation helps.
This cover for Bram Stoker's "Dracula"
adds batwings and a suggestion of drops of blood.
The type makes the subject matter pretty clear.
I used the same process to find a solution, here,
as I did with the fused metaphor.
I write my hand symbols or themes of the project
and the headline.
Then I look at the headline and sketch solutions
that combine the two.
Believe me, I've sketched some pretty stupid combinations,
but one leads to another and I often land on something
I didn't expect.