Ideas and Experimenting with Type

After looking at different ways of displaying type and poetry I thought I'd jump straight in and start experimenting with type in Illustrator. This is an idea I had for the Wordsworth poem.

I noticed the tone of voice of the poem is very passionate and he makes frequent outbursts about his feelings for the beauty and serenity of The Thames. I chose to highlight this fact by setting the exclamations in bold and in their own lines. This use of typographic hierarchy is something I found in my research and looked like it would be effective here. And I really like the effect this creates. The large phrases break up what would otherwise be a long unbroken block of text, which people might loose interest in. Also the fact that they're quite bold powerful statements should make the piece more eye-catching and attract attention from the public.

This poem is more about the poets feelings about the Thames rather than the Thames itself, and I want to communicate this through this piece. Something about the exclamation marks at the end really adds character to the words being said and expresses his passion for the Thames to the audience. Visually these lines jump out at the audience in a similar way as if they were being shouted.

I played around with different typefaces briefly whilst designing this piece. One that I'm quite fond of is called Imprint MT Shadow that has the look of classic roman type, with a slightly decorative feel, which reminded me of the sort of type found in 18th century books and posters. This ties in nicely with the poem as it was written in 1789.

 

Imprint MT Shadow.

I noticed that these 18th century posters that read top to bottom make similar use of typographic hierarchy to emphasize important words and messages. They also feature a mix of roman, humanist and blackletter typefaces which signify different levels of importance or context for each word. I may choose to incorporate a range of type styles as I develop this piece.