Design Principles: Type Hierarchy

In design principles today we looked at our arrangements of "the quick brown fox" using diferent types of fonts. We used a square art board as to not force the readers eye into reading it to the right and downwards as we are taught. We found that:

1.The block font was hardest to work with as it has very tight kerning and a very thick line weight which made it stand out the most, but also made it the least legible.

2.The script font was the least legible because of it's line weight and unusual letterforms so needed to scaled appropriately, depending on where in the sentence it was used.

3.The roman and gothic fonts were the easiest to work with as they were legible at any scale. This is because of the balanced kerning and generic letterforms that make it easy to recognise each letter clearly.

We then look at the hierarchy of type in newspapers. We took a newspaper page each and cut out, in order, the most eye catching pieces of text. This allows us to see how the layout has been considered and find out why they might have layer the page out in this way. It may be for either advertisement purposes or possibly to make one story seem more important than another.

As you can see below, I found that the bold story headline stood out first. It is noticeably larger than the rest of the type on the page, and has a very tick line weight for high impact.

Next I fond my eye, leading towards the other news story title, despite its thin line weight. The "Nelson Mandela" in the top left has a thicker line weight, so naturally I would presume it would be the next one to go to, although the negative space of the secondary headline makes it seem clear and easier to read at arms length.

The body text for the secondary story was set in bold, so stood out more than the main story. The layout may be trying to lead the readers eye towards the bottom right advert.

After completing this process I placed each segment in the hierarchy of how the type is without the layout.