Type Specimen - Draft 2

I learned to use my "gut instincts"
When I had my internship during school, I was still struggling with design. When I would observe my mentor working, I would sometimes ask him why he did something one way as opposed to another, or why he would use one font, over another. Why is he doing what he is doing? And his response would almost always be: "I'm just going with my gut instincts."

I was never able to bring myself to ask him what would happen if a designer didn't have any gut instincts, as I thought was the case for me. As he would answer my questions, I would sit there, thinking, "Crap." I would never become a designer.

And now, with the hours I spent working on this type project, I realized that I did have some sort of instinct. I slowly plodded through line by line, choosing a type, laying it out, play around with spacing, and move on. And before I knew it, I had an entire page that didn't look like a disaster.

THANK GOD.

Now I just need to keep it up and apply it to other projects.

Potential Future Projects

1. Corporate Identity and collateral material
2. Poster for local organization
3. Anything involving magazines or books.

New York State License Plates

This is a bit of old news, but I figured this is the best place to write about them.

New York state license plates. This is what I am used to:



And this is what I have been noticing, to my dismay:


I am thinking, "Why?" Who in the government is responsible for approving that this orange-y yellow is a good idea to put on cars? They went from "Empire Blue" to "Empire Gold". Why the gold?

I liked the white and blue colors of the new plates because it gave it a crisp and cool look. It looked clean. At the same time, it depicts Niagara Falls, the Adirondack Mountains, and the skyline of Manhattan, so it represents the various areas of New York.

The new plates, on the other hand, took away those images and only kept the silhouette of New York State. So right away the identity is gone. Then we have the strange yellow color. The image above I think is actually brighter than the what the actual plates are like. In addition, the yellow tends to clash with the color of the cars. I find that very distracting.

When my family received a letter a few weeks ago about the new license plates, it stated that we had to pay to get the new plates. We all scoffed and tossed it into the garbage. We will be holding on to our Empire Blue for as long as we possibly can.

Type Specimen - Draft 1

I did not expect to be able to finish this, but here it is!! Yay! And I was able to complete two in one day!

It was very difficult to choose typefaces, first of all. And after you choose them, you have to figure out which ones to use for which lines. Then you have to split the lines and see where they would fit, and how they would fit. Next you would have to play with leading and kerning and tracking to make sure everything lines up neatly. Fortunately, I was getting somewhat faster towards the end.

I thought I would be putting in more ornamentation, especially for the first page. It's a bit bland. I've been staring at it for a while, but I don't know what to do with it. I'll play around with putting borders around the text next time to give it some sort of space to own.

Type Specimen - Copy Text (For Real!)

Okay. So as I was looking through examples of type specimen, I realized that I was going need some more copy text in order to have enough material to play around with. I was in my room to get something and the bright red book sat on my dresser. It was Glenn Duncan's I, Lucifer. I looked at it, and thought that it might work well with what I wanted to make, and so I copied almost all of the first section which outlines Lucifer's fall. I love this book. I bought it because I loved it from the very first line.

"I, Lucifer, Fallen Angel, Prince of Darkness, Bringer of Light, Ruler of Hell, Lord of the Flies, Father of Lies, Apostate Supreme, Tempter of Mankind, Old Serpent, Prince of This World, Seducer, Accuser, Tormenter, Blasphemer, and without doubt Best Fuck in the Seen and Unseen Universe (ask Eve, that minx) have decided — oo-la-la! — to tell all.
All? Some. I’m toying with that for a title: Some. My side of the story. The funk. The jive. The boogie. The rock and roll. (I invented rock and roll. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve invented. Anal sex, obviously. Smoking. Astrology. Money... Let’s save time: Everything in the world that distracts you from thinking about God. Which... pretty much... is everything in the world, isn’t it? Gosh.)

"Now, your million questions. All, in the end, the same question: What’s it like being me? What, for heaven’s sake, is it like being me?

"Naivety’s conspicously absent from my own CV. As a matter of fact I can hear and see pretty much everything in the human realm pretty much all the time. In the human realm (trumpets and cymbal-crash of celebration, please...) I’m omniscient. More or less. Which is just as well, since there’s so much you curious little monkeys want to know. What is an angel? Is Hell really hot? Was Eden really lush? Is Heaven as dull as it sounds? Do homosexuals suffer eternal damnation? And what about being consensually buggered by your lawful wedded hubby on his birthday? Are Buddhists okay?


"Once upon a...

"Time, you’ll be pleased to know — and since one must start somewhere — was created in creation.

"The question What was there before creation? is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation. What there was was the Old Chap peering in a state of perpetual nowness up His own almighty sphincter trying to find out who the devil He was. His big problem was that there was no way to distinguish Himself from the Void. If you’re Everything you might as well be Nothing. So He created us, and with a whiz and a bang (quite a small one, actually) Old Time was born.

"Time is time, you’ll say (actually no: time is money, you’d say, you darlings) but what do you know? Old Time was different. Roomier. Slower. Textually richer (Think Anne Bancroft’s mouth). Old Time measured the motion of spirits, a far more refined dimension than New Time, which measures the motion of bodies, and which made its first appearance when you prattling gargoyles arrived and started mincing everything up into centuries and nanoseconds, making everyone feel exhausted the whole time. Therefore Old Time and New Time, ours and yours. We were around — Seraphim, Cherubim, Dominations, Thrones, Powers, Principalities, Virtues, Archangels and Angels — for a terribly long stretch before Himself started getting His hands dirty with a material universe. Back then in Old Time things were blissfully incarnate. Those were the days of grace. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: kneecaps only exist to get hit with claw-hammers; grace only exists to be fallen from.


"So what happened? That’s what you want to know. (It’s what you always wanted to know, bless you. Along with What should we do? And What would happen if? Hardly ever accompanied, I’m happy to note, by: Ah, but where will it all end?) We’ve got AntiTime and GodVoid. We’ve got GodVoid distinguishing Itself into God and Void in an act of spontaneous creation — the creation of angels, whose purpose is revealed to them instantaneously in their bright (man that was bright) genesis, namely, to respond to God rather than Void, and to respond (to put it mildly) positively. There’s no human word for the undiluted adulation we were expected to dish out, ad nauseam, ad infinitum. The Old Man was insecure from day one. Disencumbering the Divine Wazoo of the Divine Head, He filled it instead with 301,655,722 extramundane brown-nosers for-He’s-a-jolly-good-fellowing Him in deafening celestial harmony. (That’s how many we are, by the way. We don’t age, we don’t get sick, we don’t die, we don’t have kids. Well, we don’t have little angels. There are the Nephilim — those freaks — but more of them later.) He created us and assumed — though naturally He knew the assumption was false — that the only possible response to His perfection was obedience and praise, even from ultra-luminous superbeings like us. He didn’t know, however, that all the angelic carolling in the antimaterial universe counted for nothing if it was automatic. if everything He was getting was congenitally guaranteed He might as well have installed a jukebox. (I invented jukeboxes, by the way. So that people could suck up rock and roll at the same time as getting drunk and rubbing their groins together.) Therefore He created us — God help Him — free.

"And that, you will not be surprised to hear, was the root of all the trouble.


"Give the Old Boy his due. He was almost right. (Well, actually, He was completely right in knowing that He was wrong in thinking it was all going to turn out okay — but there’s no telling this story without contradictions.) He was almost right. It turned out, once we were around to experience Him, that God was incredibly nice. It’s quite something, you know, to feel yourself bathed in Divine Love all the time. it’s hard not to feel grateful — and we did. We all really did feel nothing but refulgent gratitude, and spared not our throats in telling Him so. It was obvious — He discovered what He’d known all along — that He loved an audience. The creation of the angels an the first crank of Old Time had shown him Who and What He was: God, Creator, alpha and omega. He was Everything, in fact, apart from that which He created. You could feel His relief: I’m God. Phew. Cool. Fucking knew it.

"Perennial and all-encompassing love notwithstanding, we were aware of our condition, a queasy cocktail of subordination and imperishability. Ask me now why He made us eternal and the answer is (after all time, Old and New): I haven’t a clue. Why I’m still running around mucking things up... I’m a proud bird — it’s been made much of, my pride — but I’m not stupid. If God wanted to destroy me He could. It’s the CIA and Saddam. Yet I’ve known from the Begining (we all knew) that once created, the angels would exist forever. ‘An angel is for life,’ Azazel says, ‘not just for fucking Christmas.’ But I digress. I’m schizophrenic with digression. Awful for you I’m sure — but what do you expect? My name is Legion, for we are many. And what’s more, I have of late...

"Never mind that for the time being.

"He turned a side of Himself to us and from it poured an ocean of love in which we sported and splashed like orgasmic skippers, singing our response in flawless a capella (those were the halcyon days before Gabriel took up the horn) as reflexively — as unreflexively — as if we had been no more than a heavenly jukebox. Since he was infinitely loveable it never occurred to us that we had any choice but to love Him. To know Him was to love Him. And so it went for what would have been millions of millions of your years. Then —
Ah yes. Then.


"One day, one non-material day, nowhere, a thought came unbidden into my spirit mind. One moment it wasn’t there, the next it was, and the next again it was gone. It flitted in then out again like a bright bird or a flurry of jazz notes. For the briefest, most titillating moment my voice faltered and the first hairline crack in the Gloria appeared. You should have seen the looks. Heads turned, eyes flashed, feathers ruffled. The thought was: What would it be like without Him?

"The Heavenly Host recovered in a twinkling. I’m not sure Michael even noticed, the dolt. The Gloria renewed, saccharine sweet, porcelain smooth, and we delivered ourselves to him in splashed bouquets — but it was there: freedom to imagine existing without God. That thought had made a difference and that thought, that liberating, revolutionary, epoch-making thought, was mine. Say what you like about me. Tempter I may be, tormentor, liar, accuser, blasphemer and all-round bad egg, but no one else gets the credit for the discovery of angelic freedom. That, my fleshly friends, was Lucifer. (Ironic of course that after the Fall they stopped referring to me as Lucifer, the Bearer of Light and started referring to me as Satan, the Adversary. Ironic that they stripped me of my angelic name at the very moment I began to be worthy of it.)
The thought spread like a virus. There were slight signals from some, a freemasonry of freedom. They made themselves known to me, shyly, came out like pubescent boys to a queer professor. Plenty didn’t. Gabriel drew away from me. Michael kept himself aloof. Poor, gorgeous, shilly-shallying Raphael, who loved me almost as much as he loved the Old Chap, sang on for a while in tremulous uncertainty. But what, after all, had I done? (And what had I done that He hadn’t known I was going to do?)


"A strange few millenia followed. Word got out. The Brotherhood grew. He knew, of course, the Old Man. He’d known all along, even before knowing all along was possible, in the absence of all along. it’s so irritating being with someone who knows everything, don’t you think? You call them know-alls down here. Well your know-alls are empty vessels compared t the One we had to deal with. Everything other than your rapturous celebration of His Divinity — conversation, punchlines, wrapping presents, surprise parties — is pointless. There’s only one response God’s got to anything you might care to tell Him — that your brother’s dying of AIDS, for example, and that you’d really appreciate it if He could help out with a bit of the old razzle-dazzle — and that response is: Yeah, I know.

"The Brotherhood’s voices stirred and tried new angles. I was sick of the over-orchestrated molasses of the Gloria anyway. All that legato. No soul, you know? Angels don’t have souls, in case you’re interested. You lot are on your own with souls. I’ve purchased millions in my time, but I’m hanged if I know what to do with them. The only thing they seem to respond to is suffering. These days I delegate. Belial’s got a real taste for it. Moloch, too, though he’s got no imagination: he just eats them, shits them out, eats them, shits them out, eats them, etc. Does the trick, mind you. Those souls scream with a piteousness that’s sweet music to my pitiless tympanum. Astaroth just talks to them. Christ knows what about. Christ does know what about too, but there’s not a damned thing he can do about it, not once they’re down in the basement. After Yours Truly, there’s no one can bend a soul’s ear like Nasty Asty. Taught the rascal everything he knows. Course he’s hung up on all that pupil-outstripping-the-master nonsense. Thinks I don’t know he’s after my throne. (Thinks I don’t know. I shall have to do something about Astaroth when I get back. I shall have to make arrangements.)
You might be wondering — the hard-men among you, the nutters, the glassers, the thugs — whether you couldn’t hack it in Hell, whether you couldn’t, when it came right down to it, just butch the bastard out. Well, guess what: You couldn’t.
Actually, none of that’s true. Old habits and so on. The truth is, Hell’s okay. Most of the souls at my place just hang around smoking and drinking and chewing the fat. And there’s everything to read.

"Anyway, the word spread. Our voices moved through the clear waters of the Gloria like a turbid undertow. We did nothing. We didn’t know what to do. What did we have anyway but a solitary speculation? After that first shy caress, that first inkling of selfhood, we sang on in a state of mere confusion for hundreds of thousands of years. And I daresay we’d still be singing now if rumour hadn’t reached us of the script in development, a Father Production with a working title “The Material Universe” (it came out eventually as Creation) scheduled for release sometime within the next thousand and starring — naturally — the Son."


I know. It's insanely long. I took this all before realizing how ridiculously long it would take me to lay out one page (why oh why is this so difficult?). The original plan was to have a series of posters, but at this rate, I'll be lucky to get two. *Sigh* I will update the text with what I'm actually including by Monday at the earliest.

Type Specimen - Text (Thoughts)

My reason for choosing to start with Victorian typography is because of its solid structure. My goal is to be able to eventually be good enough of a designer to be able to break away from structure and create visually complex designs. In order to do that, I feel that I need to first get a firm grasp of structured and organized design in order to break these rules effectively. Through structured design, I will be able to slowly but surely learn the rules, why something will look better next to one than the other.

I want to learn how to break up the space in order to create room for key components. I want to learn what I can change, warp, and distort in order for the objects to fit within a certain space. I want to learn how to size things and color things so that the viewers will see the objects in the order that I want them to see them. I want to learn what I can do to create energy in such a structured environment. What works, and what doesn't work? Why? How can I make something look dynamic?

Once I learn the stability of structure, I can then change angles to create energy. What is the best way to use the space? Do people prefer to see text and images turned clockwise, or counterclockwise? Does it matter?

There are too many questions. I wonder if I'll be able to find the answers.

Type Specimen - Color Swatches

Pulled this off of Kuler because I liked the theme.


Another version I made from tweaking it around a bit...

Took these colors from this picture which I post again:

In the beginning, when I was thinking of what colors to use, I just wanted either plain black and white, or black, white, and red. These are colors I took from another poster here:


When I start shifting over to a more modern look such as the Cadillac advertisement, perhaps:

Type Specimen - Text

Notes to self (to use in type specimen):
The Victorian Era is named after Queen Victoria, who reigned from Jun 1937 to January 1901. The latter half of the Victorian era coincided with the first portion of Europe's Belle Epoque and the Gilded Age of the United States. The era is characterized as a long period of peace, known as the Pax Britannica, and economic, colonial, and industrial consolidation.
The arts of the Victorian era are marked by a revival and interpretation of historic styles, and the cross-cultural influences from the middle east and Asia in furniture, fittings, and interior decoration. The Arts and Crafts movement, the aesthetic movement, Anglo-Japanese style, and Art Nouveau style have their beginnings in the late Victorian era.

Photography was introduced.
Victorian typography can also be seen in the typography of the American Old West, also called the Wild West.

Characterizations to note are slab serifs, decorative motifs within each letter.

Framing and symmetry is important to give the structured look.

Symmetrical banners

The page is almost always filled with type and pictures. Busy, yet very structured.
Hand-drawn type.

Soft, romantic colors. Primary

Type Samples

Looking up some images to update Intermediate Graphic Design type samples.

Dylan Roscover (to go under the "Fit in Shape" category). I remember seeing this on the cover of Time Magazine (2.1.2010). Blew me away.

C.O. Bigelow - A cosmetics company. I really like their designs. This would fit under "Hollywood Boulevard" in a vague sense because of the use of sans-serif with a display font.

Punk/Dada - Marinetti

I remember in school, whenever our teacher spoke of the history of modern typography and graphic design, she would always start with Marinetti. I envy his ability to create such wonderful chaos.

Swipe: Typography

I've been really interested in Victorian typography for a while. I attempted to imitate some of it for my senior year final project, but it never got the depth, and I couldn't get the details right. Perhaps I will be a bit more successful with this next project?
I'm not so sure how successful I will be at banners and detailed design elements. We'll have to see once I get started.

I guess I really like this style because so many fonts come together to create a cohesive whole.

I have been searching for days for this. I have seen it several times on TV, and I liked the gridded organization of the text. After gnashing my teeth and wracking my brain, I figured it out in a dream last night (I think this may be the first time I solved a problem in a dream. Hopefully the first of many?)

Cadillac CTS-V 2010


Maybe I'll start out with Victorian, then change over to this modernized grid for the type specimen?