Thursday, June 27, 2002

FELLOWSHIP JOURNAL
Creative Typography:
Compare and Contrast

By Kathryn Cook

Visual journalism fellows spent last week exploring the fundamentals of design, working with type, grids and color to create rhythm and contrast. For this exercise, fellows designed pages using only typography. After they completed their designs, they were asked to simplify them, using only three contrasts.

The first layout I designed was full of contrasts, both in typography and color. The background was black, the letters were different sizes and colors. While trying to achieve the screaming effect for my story, the message I was trying to send was becoming lost.

Monica Moses gave us several tips to make our designs more effective.

Good design is a balance:

• Complexity -- simplicity
• Chaos -- control
• Contrast -- uniformity

Design should make content more understandable. Monica asked that we eliminate ALL but three contrasting elements in our second attempt.

I immediately removed the black background and contrast in letter size and font. I made "The" and "Match" the same size and decided that the best way to achieve the screaming effect of my title was to make it big, bold and red. That was the single largest contrast of my page.

I do not have a background in design, so I didn't realize that I was breaking many basic design rules in the first draft. But with a background in photojournalism, the concepts made sense because they could also be applied to the composition of a photograph. Extra clutter that does not contribute to the story only makes it harder to understand.

Like photojournalism, page design is also a form of storytelling, and each element should be carefully thought out or the message becomes lost. When the unneeded extras are eliminated, the message becomes clearer and the story has the strongest impact.

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