The submissions for last few show off Tuesday's have been rather astounding. It was very difficult to select a winner from last week's post because of how many outstanding pieces there were and because of the wide variety of disciplines/mediums that they represented. Therefore, today's selected creation should not be considered the winner, but simply one creation that is featured because of its relevance to current conversations that have taken place within the group.
We have selected David Callivetta's "Art Deco Script Font," because it is super cool and nostalgic and interesting. I am not a graphic designer, and I have not studied type in any serious way- but what I do know is that making a good font is hard as hell, and its something that is so subtle that in many ways it is overlooked.
Graphic Design and (as a particular branch of graphic design) Branding has become a rather notorious topic in the group recently because it is so elementary that it is so often overlooked for more flashy mediums. A really cool font is perhaps less gripping than a really good 2 minute promo video, and so to the untrained eye, the former may never be noticed. Indeed, only the nerdiest of priggish artsy types would look at the wedding invitation with its header written in David Cal's Script, and say "wow that's a really cool art deco font... and the the kearning is fantastic. Look at how balanced the flourishes look on that s."
No, the person who receives a wedding invitation with the heading typed in this font will get the vague notion that they are being invited to a very posh, vintage, prohibition era party, to which they might be expected to bring their own mason jar and wear suspenders. They will feel privileged to be the recipient of such a selective invite to such an trendy, upper-crust event, and they will see images of how they are dressed, what everyone else looks like, etc. All this will happen before their mind consciously registers whose wedding this is inviting them to.
The design of a typeface is an incredibly subtle art, where each element is selected like an ingredient by a master chef to conjure nostalgic memories, fantasies, dreams, hopes, and visions, but done in such a way as to make each ingredient invisible and subjected to the experience of the meal as whole. The professional designer thus paints with our own mind's pre-acquired associations- this flourish here, this jaunty angle on the A, the loop under the "m," etc-- to associate the literal words written (dressed in this font) with invisible images; images that are present in our memories. This particular font of David C's does a fantastic job of taping into a our imaginations of the world just after Gatsby & Downton Abby, at the dawn of Mad Men, Prohibition, and book-ended by the World Wars.
Check out more of his stuff here, and if you feel so compelled, pick a couple up for your designer tool kit.