Gill Sans & Surrealism.
Fall 2023.
In John Kane's Typography II class, we spent the semester combining two seemingly random texts into one, cohesive publication. I focused on the Surrealism Movement and the typeface, Gill Sans.
Making sure the two texts were easily distinguishable from each other was extremely important for readability. To accomplish this, the surrealism text utilized a sans serif typeface, thin stroke, and larger font size than the Gill Sans text which featured a serif typeface, bolder stroke, and smaller font size. The bodies of text also lived on two different axis, with surrealism always starting mid-page with a shorter line length, and Gill Sans at the top with a longer line length.
While contrast in the type treatment was important, maintaining this contrast through the entire composition was essential for engagement. The biggest takeaway I had from this project was, "in order for something to be big, you need something to be small." While this sounds relatively simple, this piece of advice from John Kane was the aha! moment I needed. It's easy to get stuck in the habit of making every image and body of text relatively the same size, especially when doing page after page after page. The problem with this is everything starts to blur together and look the same, or flat. It wasn't until I started breaking out of my comfort zone, making the smallest images smaller, and the larger even larger, that I finally achieved this successful, dynamic design.
Check out the full publication below.
Is this history class?
