First Years, Eighth Project - Typographic Basics

Our first year students have just spent a challenging and fruitful two weeks working alongside our 'national treasure', H.R.H The Typographer Royal, Dame Rhiannon Robinson OBT*.

As you probably know, Dame Rhiannon is a demanding taskmistress with a ruthless, critical eye that can spot the slightest typographic imperfection at more than twenty paces. 

Luckily for our novice students she took them through the fundamentals of good typography through a series of lectures and workshops (see previous post).

This is but the start of a very long journey, but even after such a short time the students can all spot loose tracking, unfortunate apostrophes, orphans, widows and line lengths that are too long or too short.

The project was deceptively simple. Take some information about an event that looks like this:

...and turn it into something you might actually want to read!

Let's see how they got on.

 As ever, we design on paper before gravitating towards the Mac

Once the design has been put together in InDesign there are still lots of refinements to be made as you can see below:

*Order of British Typography.