Typography

The typography assignment is similar to the logo design, in that you should consider the product, brand, service, or concept it represents and how your typographic design portrays that. What does your font choice say about your client? Who is the audience or user group, and what will appeal to them?

Above were my comparisons of different fonts that I have on my laptop. I am a hobbyist video editor, so I enjoy collecting fonts from around the Internet. The fonts here are:

I knew that I wanted either a sharp font or a futuristic font. Ultimately, because the logo that I made used pixel art, I wanted the typography assignment to use a pixel font. Therefore, I chose Best Ten CRT for the typography assignment.

(This is the reverse of what I said about the logo, where I said that I wanted the logo to be pixelated because the font associated with the band before ISE 333 was a pixel font. This is intentional. I wanted to keep the aesthetic that the band originally had, even though the aesthetic was a spur-of-the-moment development for Brook Con Live! promotions.)

I made multiple versions of the logotype. The color versions emphasize abbreviations for the band name. I also made versions in both English and Japanese because of the band’s association with Japanese rock bands and culture.

The version in Japanese with the full name has the first two characters of each word colored instead of just the first character of each word because of the way names are often abbreviated in Japanese. “Gorilla Destiny” is most naturally shortened to “GoriDes,” represented in katakana as ゴリデス.

For the type sampler, I used Noto Sans JP (Regular 400) for body text. Mixing pixel fonts and high-resolution fonts is controversial, but I prioritized readability over consistency. The decision to use Noto Sans was based on visual harmony as well as video games like Celeste and Octopath Traveler, which blend pixel art with modern fonts. One of the artists who worked on Celeste wrote an essay about this topic that I found insightful.