Typography is a key part of any brand, this week what really stood out to me was how much of a brand’s values and personality you can communicate with typography. I am much more aware now of how important it is, when choosing typefaces to choose based on how effective they will be in communicating the brand values. As well as their readability and accessibility rather than simply whether or not I personally like them. Another key point from this week’s lecture, was when describing designs to speak in terms of how effective the design/typography/colour scheme is. Rather than speaking in terms of my own preferences and whether I like or dislike the design.
We started this week’s class by considering the names we had all come up with for our bank brands. Our Lecturer Daniel set up a Miro board with five spaces each to place our top five possible names, and sticky notes to allow all members of the class to indicate their top three choices of name. Below you can see the full Miro board for everyone.
This was a really great opportunity to test my own names in front of twenty-one members of my target audience. As all of my classmates are university students between the ages of 18-25 years-old. My results are below:
I received a very clear response to my five options, with “FUTR” taking both the most overall votes (19) and the most first preferences (17). “FUTR” was my own preferred brand name as well and a quick Google search reveals it is only currently used by a AI (Artificial Intelligence) company not any brands in the banking sector. I will concentrate the vast majority of my branding work moving forward on “FUTR” but I think at this early stage it would be sensible to also keep another name in mind, and this is a more tricky choice as while “Focus” got more overall votes (17) it was “Flexibank” with only one less (16) who received more first and second preference votes. The majority of “Focus” votes being third preference. For me, I will keep ideas for “Flexibank” in my thinking at least during this early development stage, just in case as we move through the branding process, I have issues with “FUTR”.
This was a really helpful exercise as not only did it give me really useful feedback from a sample of my target audience. I also found it useful be part of the feedback loop, so to speak and help my fellow classmates out by giving my opinion on the names they had come up with for their own banking brands.
We started the lecture with a quick recap on the history of visual communication, starting with cave paintings, which are highly illustrative and pictorial. Moving through early letterforms painted or carved into stone (Egyptian Hieroglyphs for example), before early alphabets and a set system of visual/written communication was laid out.
It was an interesting fact that serifs, a major section of available typefaces and one which I have to consider (usually against sans serif options) in my design work, came as a by-product of the chisels used to carve letterforms into stone, rather than for a particular stylistic reason.
As versions of what we would call paper, but often animal skins came along on which to write important texts. It was only very highly skilled individuals who had received a lot of training who were able to write, very often these would be monks and the works they produced would be acts of devotion to God. This meant they were often very ornate and a lot of time was spent creating them, see below the Book of Kells a great example of this highly ornate and amazingly skilled work, on display at Trinity College in Dublin.
