What kind of experimental type shall I do?

Being that in this post-modern society/information saturated age, type is everywhere, and there's so much of it, what would it mean to create a typeface that would be readable but will kind of disappear to ease the eyes and make reading more fun?

Two ideas on that:
1. when type becomes art it's less type looking and more visual (it should still be readable though)
2. when you take a font, see how much of it you can subtract before it becomes illegible

Examples links of those ideas:
Logotype for Eyeglasses manufacturer, Tokyo, Japan by Tomato, UK

The Designers Republic

The Designers Republic by blog.eyemagazine.com

LUSH Magazine redesigned by Paul Sych

I'm interesting in advertising type and signage stuff that is more minimal and simple, that makes the world of reading a lot easier.

Here's some more examples where the type doesn't scream at you, instead it's part of the design:

The Designers Republic

Brody@Rocket Poster, Neville Brody

Neville Brody, Research Studios

The Designers Republic

The Designers Republic

Part of the Dubnobasswithmyheadman CD cover for Underworld, by Tomato, UK

Love these old Playstation graphics by The Designers Republic

Cover of the Offf Festival Design catalogue. Beautiful.

Some of that same typeface.

Alva-Alva.com

A poster I picked up at Offf 2009 for another design festival last September.

What is information architecture?

It is creating meaning or understanding using design. It's not just making something look nice, it's understanding the meaning behind something and being able to articulate that meaning using design. Designers often just make things look nice and that misses the point. How can that design really help anyone if the person who designed it didn't understand the content themselves?

From the users perspective "the ability to find something goes hand in hand with how well the information is organized" (Introduction to Information Architecture, Wurman). If a designer is designing the signage around a store, how can he design it right if he hasn't actually gone to the store and tried time and time again to get around the store, to encounter the same pitfalls that the customer encounters?

"Information architecture is most brilliant when you can find yourself in the picture, when you can relate to the information" says Wurman. If you look at a picture of the new tallest building, the Burj Dubai, it's almost impossible to get a sense of scale or of how tall it is. If you would be able to see a person next to it, the visual would be that much more impacting. The barrage of pie charts and graphs through the nineties are all so boring because you can't find yourself in the design. If somehow you can find yourself in the design, then the design really works.

A great article by Richard Saul Wurman

I love this because this is where I've been for the last year... being so bored with making things just look nice, rather creating graphics that really help people and therefore contribute to society. I've had my fill of nice looking print pieces that only serve to contribute to the mass of information already out there.

I had my first stab at information architecture with the International House of Prayer. They asked me to define, in a graphic, the organization; how all the ministry they do revolves around praying and the prayer room. The graphic below is the graphic I came up with. I was only able to do this because I understood the ministry after working there 5 years. Had I just come in as a contractor I probably wouldn't have gotten the gist of it unless I did extensive research (which is entirely the point). The level we didn't take it to which we should have done is to get the public and the management to test it before release. Because we didn't do this the graphic made no sense to the public, only looked nice and the management didn't get it at all so it fell off the shelf within 6 months of being published. Lesson learned.

Typography everywhere!

I went out shooting photographs of type in different places; magazines, store fronts, products, even on cars. I came away with two observations, that type is used in two main areas: advertising and information graphics.

If advertising, designers seem to have a lot more freedom with their fonts adding 'extra' design to their type to add more emphasis to the emotion they are conveying. For example, in the image below the designer has used a very strong, bold, typeface and put crack marks through it to add to the rugged, street value of the ad.

If typefaces are used for information graphics like magazine mastheads or signs then it seems they are used just as is with very little alteration, like this example of a pedestrian crossing sign. The instruction has to be clear therefore there is no clutter.

It does seem much of the advertising out there is so cluttered and busy. It's hard to land on anything! I found this ad and liked the simplicity of it:

I'm interested in making the kind of type that by treating it a certain way, you can convey more of a feeling than by just writing the word out in plain black and white text. The text becomes art.

This animation was used at the Offf conference in Lisbon last year. The whole image is very fluid and very motivating. It somehow makes me want to get out of my seat and create!

Work over the winter

Here are a couple Live projects I did over the winter intercession. The first is a flier for a church event:

I was pleased with this piece for a couple reasons: one, its use of metaphor, the guy breaking through the brick wall is a picture of breaking free of things in the past and on the reverse side there are a couple of bricks taken out of the wall to see the possibilities of what lies beyond.

Second is the use of mixed media and collage. Since I was small I've loved sketching and pen and ink work but it's never really made it into my design work. One reason is that design studios are often so fast paced, you never get the time to produce this kind of work. With this piece I had some time so used pen and ink for the wall, cut photographs for the grass and wall and water color for the sky.

The next piece was a logo design for a local ice cream company just getting started. Actually, it's my neighbor. He's recently bought an old vintage ice cream making machine (looks like an old steam engine) and is going to tour the country's festivals and sell ice cream. This is the finished logo:

And this is a self portrait I did for fun. You can see I'm really having fun with the pen again :)