As I read Jo Mackiewicz’s article “What Technical Writing Students Should Know About Typeface Personality”, one little phrase caught my eye.

“Students, after all, are not bound by corporate style manuals” (pg. 2).

This made me laugh a little. Sure students are not bound by corporate style manuals, but they are certainly not as free to do as they like creatively as the sentence implies. Mackiewicz is talking specifically about technical writing students. He says they must learn how to select appropriate fonts, but he also says there are not constraining style guidelines. This is not exactly true, and it made me thing about students in general—particularly middle/high schoolers.

Typeface fail

I came across this picture when looking at different typefaces successes and failures and I found this one from the Arthur's Fresh Juice Company. They choose and interesting typeface for their "Pom Plus" juice bottle. I find it hard to not to see it to say something else. The "m" looks like an "rn". Even in this typeface as well as many others this is a very easy to have this happen.

I have always liked the covers of Western Horseman magazines. I am a long time subscriber and enjoy the images and quality of the front covers. I am using this opportunity to apply the Kress Van Leewan tool to the January 2013 cover of Western Horseman.

The magazine definitely makes use of the centre of the cover. The image of the horse and cowgirl dominate the centre and right of centre. The dog at the bottom is nice addition for readers.

The theory that revolves around the concept of the given, ideal, new, and real is one that I consistently sea whenever I look at an advertisement.  It’s a rhetorical theory that is evident it not just current adds but older ones as well.  For example, the add below is an old coca cola advertisement. The heading “Thirst asks nothing more” is considered the ideal portion of the advertisement.
1

In the article “What Technical Writing Students Should Know About Typeface Personality,” Mackiewicz quotes Burmark as saying that “certain fonts are out of place in certain situations.” I feel like the importance of typeface choice is greatly overlooked when people are trying to create an effective document.

Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (the book for which there may or may not be a link to hidden in the shared class folder), gets into some fascinating stuff right around Chapter 6, "The Meaning of Composition."  In class, we only touched on the major hypothesis, that of the Given/New, Ideal/Real, and Centre/Margin.  We've also danced around ideas of appropriateness in visual design.  The interesting stuff lies here, in that idea--and in a larger sense, our entire major.

Maybe it’s just me, but when we were looking at the different styles of political ads, I couldn't really tell the difference between a “good” or “bad” campaign poster. I felt like I was looking at a slideshow of posters that were all variations of the same thing. Same color schemes (red, white, and blue…shocker), same format, same look. I’m not sure why the look of these posters would sway a person’s vote to a particular candidate.

One thing that has stuck with me from the readings so far this semester was the Phillips articles claim that advertising has steadily relied more and more on images to sell products. Various ways of using images were examined and some of these are quite sophisticated, occupying different arenas of richness and complexity. The typology of visual rhetoric provided shows nine distinct types of images as visual rhetoric.
1

According to the Oakland Museum of Californication, the poster shown below is an political adaptation of the renowned Vietnam-War-era photograph by Eddie Adams, of a Vietnamese police chief executing a Vietcong operative. The original photograph proved to be very contentious, and led to the surfacing of censorial issues of the coverage of war by American reporting agencies in wars to follow. These issues are still relevant today as pertaining to the coverage of the Afghan and Iraq wars.

The Anatomy of Typefaces

In the article by Jo Mackiewicz, there was quite a bit of information presented, but only one section that seemed particularly applicable. The section entitled "The Anatomy of Typefaces" outlines how proportion, modeling, and construction can either help or inhibit a work of technical writing.
Blog Archive
Blog Archive
Contributors
Contributors
Loading
Dynamic Views theme. Powered by Blogger. Report Abuse.