Hidden Images

A lot of thought goes into a logo. While needing to be clear and easy to read, a logo also has to draw in the eye and grab attention. In addition to this, a good logo is one that is memorable and easily identifiable. The four images above are examples pulled from the website Twenty Two Words, and are just a small selection of many. I highly recommend taking a minute to follow the link and check out some more examples (there are multiple pages, the 'next page' button is a little difficult to find down near the bottom).

How many had you seen before?
How many were new?

A lot of messages/images are hidden in plain sight in logos we see very frequently but probably don't put much extra thought into. For example, we've all seen FedEx trucks driving around at some point in our lives, and most of us have probably never noticed the arrow formed by the "E" and "X" (All thanks to kerning, if you haven't go check out my post explaining what that is!). The designer of the logo, however, deliberately placed the arrow there, likely to symbolize speed or travel.




This is a link to some more popular logos that includes a paragraph or so for each that goes into a little depth about why it looks the way it does. My personal favorite is the old Northwest Airlines logo. It has since been changed, but former pilot Patrick Smith had this to say about it: "... quite simply was a work of genius. It was an 'N'; it was a 'W'; it was a compass pointing toward the northwest."



Can you see all three parts of the circular logo? It wasn't obvious to me at first glance but once I saw it, it instantly became my favorite logo design so far. The logo is simple, yet has layers underneath depending on how much thought you want to put into it. Why they changed this logo, I'll never understand.

Kinetic Typography

Kinetic typography is quite simply the combination of text and movement. The video embedded above is a great example of what kinetic typography is and some of the techniques used.

I'm sure that you've heard "a picture is worth a thousand words" in your life in some form or another. A picture speaks in such a powerful way because the image is presented to us in a more engaging manner than a block of text, and the human brain is able to process images nearly 60,000 times more quickly than text. To describe an image in a way that it could be reproduced based just on your written description could take thousands of words per picture, and sometimes a message needs to be communicated more quickly.

Kinetic typography uses movement and different organizations of letters and spacing to bridge the gap between text and images, making certain words/phrases more powerful through various techniques. Text can be flashed over music, slowly fade in/out, grow larger or darker, or any number of other techniques can be used to try and elicit an emotional response from the audience.

The following links contain the sources I used for background on this post and the video I used:
Images Speak Louder Than Words
General Information
Kinetic Typography Video Examples

Kerning: The Empty Spaces Matter

"In typography kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning adjusts the space between individual letter forms, while tracking adjusts spacing uniformly over a range of characters."

Wikipedia: Kerning

     The little empty spaces between letters are important, and you could probably make the case they are almost as important as the letters themselves. I bet you've never even thought about them, and that's okay! Most people probably haven't, but it's something we should try to pay attention to because there is text all around us in the world. The spacing between letters play a large part in our lives and we hardly notice.

Below are two examples of how just a tiny difference in the spacing of letters can lead to some interesting results. The message you are trying to send can be distorted, eliminated, or just cause some laughter (as is the case in the examples below).




Breakfast WHAT? A little more space between the "L" and “I” would have made the name of the cereal easier to read and avoided appearing to contain a very different, less appetizing, word.



Every font has different spacing between letters, especially cursive script fonts. It is necessary for letters to connect and flow correctly, and it helps them look good to the eye. Some combinations of letters and spacing end up appearing a little too similar other letters.

(Images found on digitalsynopsis.com)

"People are not going to approach your design with rulers, trying to see if you spaced everything equally. People are going to look at it and see if they can easily read it, and that's all that's going to matter."

Igor Ovsyannykov

(link to blog homepage, contains creative and design advice)

10 Kerning Tips to Improve Your Typography

Visual Symbols In My Life

     I would be willing to bet almost anyone that they couldn't make it through 24 hours without using some sort of visual symbol to help them in their day. The cues we get from these daily symbols are something we have to learn throughout the course of our lives but they become incredibly important in our day-to-day activities, oftentimes without us even noticing.

(www.publicdomainpictures.net)

     This stock photo is just a set of painted white lines on some cement, yet you likely know what it is without needing much more information. The photo is of a crosswalk, and it's something that most people use nearly every day without thinking about it. White lines painted in this particular pattern has become associated with a safe crossing in most people's minds.

Why do people stop at stoplights and stop signs? Other than the fact that the law mandates that they do, people learn to associate the color red with stopping. The shape and color of a stop sign convey the message well enough that most people would stop even if the word stop was removed from the sign.

     The above image is one that I drew quickly in Microsoft Word (which I opened by clicking an icon, without reading any text). Lining things up using a touch-pad on a laptop is frustrating, but for this blog post all the lines are straight enough. I use this symbol on a daily basis when I am trying to get to class. Sometimes there are words on the sign, but oftentimes it is just a gray sign with a couple of black line segments organized like my drawing above. With or without words on the sign, this symbol is enough to let me know the stairs I am looking for are nearby.