When using type, an important consideration is the appropriate type of typeface to use. For formal text such as essays, a serif or sensible sans serif font would be appropriate. Likewise, for a something less formal, a playful sans serif font could be used.
To demonstrate the use of appropriate type I took excerpts from “Frankenstein” and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and arranged them using various appropriate typefaces.
I used bold display typefaces for both titles, while using a serif typeface for the Frankenstein body text and a sans-serif typeface for the DADOES body text. Both typefaces used for the body text are clear and easy to read yet still being characteristic of the text. The two typefaces used for the headers are much more stylised and bold, while they couldn’t be used for bodies of text they are good at representing the genre of the texts. This was a really useful exercise and allowed me to experiment with using different and unique typefaces.
Bruno Maag is a Swiss type designer, best known for being the founder of type design company “Dalton Maag”, his work on BBC Reith, and his strong dislike for Helvetica. Dalton Maag is a type design studio who create typefaces for a variety of clients. BBC Reith was the typeface created to replace Gill Sans, the BBC’s previous typeface and was designed to be more usable in the digital age. An interesting part of BBC Reith is that it comes in a variety of styles and alphabets. The addition of multiple styles such as serif, sans serif, and slab serif varieties allow with typeface to be used in any scenario which is necessary due to the amount of different content the BBC produce. I also found it interesting that the typeface has different alphabets due to how widespread the BBCs broadcasting is. I never considered before how difficult it must be to create multiple alphabets of characters which all fit the same style of typography.
Material Design’s “Responsive Layout Grid” sets out specific ratios to use dependant on the device and also advises on how to customise these values. As we now use a variety of platforms to view content daily, I can understand the importance of setting out specific structures per platform to allow for consistency of design.
Material Design also have a type scale tool which allows designer to generate the best scale between type sizes.
https://m2.material.io/design/layout/responsive-layout-grid.html#columns-gutters-and-margins
To put both of these systems to use I revisited one of the excerpts from earlier and designed a layout for it on an iPhone 14 screen
I can really see how useful the Material Design Responsive Layout Grid is when used alongside type scale as it helps organise and structure text while still allowing the freedom to customise type to assist the design.