Lyrics & Type

Typography is a form of expression and is the art that merges the meaning of words, colors, and shapes together, creating a piece that creates different layers of meanings through different interpretations. In this unit that focuses on Lyrics & Type, students are to create a final poster that resembles a few lines of lyrics they choose and express it through the usage of typography.

Analyzation of first typography attempts

Heavy Metal:

Usage of the bowl creates repetitive droplet shapes, and the vertex of the ‘v’, presents the audience with negative space. The overlapping tail of y can bring the effect of fusion between each ‘Heavy’

Classical:

The counters in C, s, and a, create space and compare the text to the background color, spacing out each letter with each other.

Jazz:

The counter of ‘a’ contrasts really well with the hairline of ‘z’, the overlapping characters create interest to the eye and can create shifts in the spacing between each character.

Pop:

The P’s used in pop are all capitalized, making ‘o’ the only character not included in the ascender, presenting differences In the usage of space.

Synth-wave:

The intentional rotation of ‘wave’ creates a misconception of reflection, and the aperture of ‘h’ connects with the background, creating negative space.

Hip Hop:

The intentional shift of the ‘I’ and ‘o’ to the ascender is visually different from the expected placement in the x-height, allowing the word to take up all 3 areas within the point size.

After accumulating inspiration for my final typography piece, I began creating drafts of ideas for the words of focus: ‘High’ and ‘Going Low’. Taking in new ideas from the inspirations, I noticed embedment of words inside of lyrics, and proportion changes, with decorations, these are shown in my drafts below.

The song I chose, named Bandito was a song I felt was interesting in terms of lyrics, and also melody. Out of my choices, it was the most significant and held the most interest, with a continuous theme that I felt was visually presentable. Other songs had lyrics that were either vague or had themes that were hard to present within a limited section of the lyrics.

One of my goals was to create visually interesting compositions that I would be able to incorporate within my final piece.

With this in mind, I created different pieces on Procreate with more detail, some examples would be:

Some of the fonts used were incorporated into my final composition, and others, for example, the squared piece, is the start of my final composition, but under a different kind of formatting. Some other elements included experimenting with brushes, colors, and concepts that may have been correlated with the lyrics.

After filling in the larger space, I was feeling that the bottom half of this poster was missing some elements, and I asked for feedback from my peers, some of the impressions they had were: moody, dark, and chill and they agreed that the fonts and different in size showed interest. But for the blocky parts of colors, they recommended details and designs to increase the level of attraction the bottom half could bring.

Keeping the feedback in mind, I experimented with the bottom half, using elements from the experimental poster with green vines, also taking in similar colors to create gradients and cave-like effects, but the attempts seemed to taint the blocky colors and ruined the clarity of the words of focus.

Looking for feedback once again, it seemed as if the smaller words took too much attention, and some arrangements were confusing; this lead to the search of contrast in the styles in the top and bottom half and settled with defined shapes, and lines to keep the black and white separated which brought me to the final piece.

With readjusting the words that are not of focus, and resizing the first type of lettering for ‘Going Low’ within the square format, I settled with the piece above, polishing it with different brushstrokes over different shapes.