Rules?

Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The person, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.
-The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

Monday, October 18, 2010

Design in Type

The general populace has a mental image of graphic design as a creation of various images using photoshop for print and web ads, and using 3D editing software for more advanced CGI in movies and games. However, many gloss over the subtle ways that the text we read affects us. Literally, the face of the type we read may present us with a completely different personality and experience of the design we are viewing. The updated Gap logo is an example of this.
The newly unveiled, and recently retracted, Gap Logo has a very different feel compared to the old logo. Gap released the logo as a signifier to show the transition from the concept of the Gap apparel line as having a classic, American look, into a look that would evoke cool, modern, and sexy. Now lets forget about the blue box and really delve into what the type says about both logos.




The old Gap logo has a personality that depicts classic, American, and iconic so well. The characteristic super long stem in relation to the incredibly condensed width of the letters, the classic serif typeface, and the skinny left of the A and upper and lower crossbars that hold the G and the P together create a type that emits classy with classic. The new type, on the other hand, is a very bold and heavy Helvetica, one of the most overused fonts ever created. Not only do the short, stubby, and roundness of the letters not express sexy or cool at all (they do express modern, but the old type expressed a classic modern as well), they almost express an institutionalism. The small tail on the "a" provides about the only bit of personality found in the very structured font. Overall, Gap's new logo, contrasted with their classic, iconic one, creates a feeling of super-conformity and restriction in a field (textiles), which should be about expression and creativity.


A visit to the Gap website, and one can see that ads for cool Men's and Women's wear is laden with bold, Helvetica font. This font does the perfect trick on the website, and with ads to contrast the modern, universal Helvetica font with the super-condensed, serif-laden Gap logo, it creates a great dynamic between American and iconic and modern. With proper use, the typeface can dramatically change the look and feel of any organization's representation and the perceived personality of any represented entity.










Works Cited
"Type: Anatomy." Princeton Architectural Press * Welcome. Web. 18 Oct. 2010. <http://www.papress.com/thinkingwithtype/letter/anatomy.htm>.
"Typeface Anatomy and Glossary | FontShop." FontShop. The World's Best Fonts. Web. 18 Oct. 2010. <http://www.fontshop.com/glossary.php>.
Weiner, Juli. "VF Daily." Vanity Fair Magazine | Vanity Fair. 12 Oct. 2010. Web. 18 Oct. 2010. <http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/10/new-gap-logo-despised-symbol-of-corporate-banality-dead-at-one-week.html>.
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