9.6 Tuesday

daily

Roll

Elam Quiz

The Pen Tool in Illustrator

Review start of video for additional tips.

Also: Align tools. Making copies. Type on a path. Group/ungroup.

Work on word-image exercises from last Thursday (small groups).

Discuss Logo Sketches

In small groups, share your logotype sketches:

What’s the organization/company about it?
Who will be viewing the logotype? Why?
What is the logo trying to communicate?
What makes it work? Or not work?

Sketches (from last Tuesday)

Axes in fonts (based on flat/chisel pen shape). (Note: Different than the axes of variable fonts.)

Spend 10 minutes sketching the /a/ glyphs from last Tuesday’s class notes.

A Poster (Again)

Exploring Axial with InDesign

For each chapter, we’re going to use InDesign rather than sketches because it’ll be easier to explore different versions with the same content (rather than having to write out the lettering by hand each time). We’ll use the journals/pens for other things.

Basic format is 66p0 horizontal and vertical page dimensions. Using rectangular dimensions (like standard 8.5″ x 11″ paper) adds extra complications in terms of visual design.

Here’s the text to use for the Axial exercise:

Chunklet Magazine Presents
Minus the Bear
with Tiny Vipers and Helio Sequence
October 12 8 PM Variety Playhouse
$18
From a Draplin Gig Poster

Logotype Project

NASA logo history.

Discuss ideas for logotype project.

Helvetica

Start video.

For Thursday

Read Lupton 29 – 45.

Read Logotype Project description. Do some web research on similar restaurants, noting what sorts of language they use, feeling of the fonts, logos they use, etc.

Illustrator Pen Tool Tutorial

daily, tech tip

I’ve posted a brief tutorial on using Illustrator to trace the /o/ in case you ran into issues when we covered this in class last week

9.1 Thursday

daily

Attendance

Quiz

Lupton: 13 – 27 + 68 – 71

A Poster

Printing Presses

Illustrator Tutorial

Finish Illustrator tutorial from Tuesday. Add a descender to the /o/ to make it a lowercase /p/. Use Pathfinder palette to combine both paths into a single path.

Some more Illustrator basics:

Color: Fill and Stroke
Selection Tool: For whole objects
Direct Selection Tool: Anchors, paths
Rotate
Text Tool (+ character palette, Type > Create Outline)
See Resources section on website for some Pen How-Tos

InDesign Intro

Measurement of type (and publications) often relies on picas and points rather than inches or millimeters.

Basic settings and tools.

Baseline grid

Paragraph styles

For this tutorial, our grid is going to be based on 6 points (to allow 6, 12, 18, 24 point spans).
Create a Title style (including character aspects): 19/24 Helvetica Bold)
Create a Kicker style (15/18 Helvetica Bold Italic)
Create a Normal Paragraph style (10/12 Myriad Regular)

In New Document, 66p x 66p page (use picas as measurement), 2 columns, 6p margins

In Preferences > Grid, set your baseline grid at 6 points.

View > Show Baseline Grid

Click selection tool, then click frame. Object > Text Frame Options… Select “leading”.

If right text frame doesn’t lock to baseline grid, click it and repeat.

File > Package… Package. Use default settings. Name your project with “Baseline Grid YourLastName”.

Word As Image

(from the book by Ji Lee)

In groups of two or three, use Illustrator to create a word-image for these words:

angry
music
football
streetlight

Name the file “word image LastName1 LastName2 LastName3.ai” and upload it to the appropriate folder in Google Drive.

For Tuesday

Elam: Read Intro and Axial chapters (if you don’t have the book yet, I’ve scanned this reading and posted it to Google Drive). You don’t have to do any sketches yet—in class on Tuesday, we’ll explore how to do sketches of posters for the chapter.

Sketch one interesting logo in your notebook. (Don’t use the chisel pen–just use a pencil or regular pen.) Be prepared to talk about why you like it. Consider things like how well the logotype portrays the business/organization, use of type, color, etc.