Saturday, May 11, 2013

Roger Reiman - Design - Part 4


Font Choices


In this post, I would like to explain the process I go through to choose the appropriate font for my design projects. There are literally thousands of different fonts available for design software programs. Like any topic, there are many different approaches to picking what works best for your project. I would like to outline my approach here and let you decide if it works for you or not.

I started doing logo design several years before the computer was used for the task. I learned to design my own lettering by looking through a Letraset catalog, picking a font, and then drawing them out by hand in non-repro blue pencil. From there the art and lettering was inked by hand and turned into black and white camera ready art using a vertical process camera. It was fairly tedious, but it also allowed me to create very original designs.

At that time, I worked for a specialty advertising firm that sold a lot of screen printed garments. I created logos and T-shirt designs for everything from bank presidents to bikers. I learned very quickly that picking a font for a bank is much different than picking a font for a road house! 


Each font has it's own character and can make a certain impression on the viewer. Recently, a PowerPoint presentation was given that used the font Comic San to outline the discovery of Higgs Boson. Comic Sans might be appropriate for a day care center (maybe) but not if you want to be taken seriously. When asked why they picked that font to present the discovery, the CERN presenter said..."because I like it." Just a bit of a tip, this approach is problematic, because it places too much importance on individuality. A decision based solely on personal choice does not involve the thought process required to make appropriate and successful design decisions.

Narrowing the Search


The heading above makes me chuckle a bit when I think about the process I am about to explain! I have just over 2400 individual fonts on my computer. I have a font viewer program that allows me to go through each font and see the word(s) I am trying to set in each font. I also use the website www.fontshop.com to browse their font library. Fontshop.com has the same feature that allows me to see all their fonts in whatever word(s) I am looking to set. Fontshop.com has 3,387 families of fonts which total 12,929 individual items, in the display font category alone.

So, I usually search though both my computer's font viewer program and Fontshop.com's library of fonts to find the best solution for the design I am working on. That equates to scrolling trough about 15,000 fonts. You might ask yourself, what exactly am I looking for? Well, I am looking to fill certain parameters specific to each design or element of a design.

For instance, I wanted the Roger Reiman name used on our mural to be very bold and easy to read while approaching at 25 m.p.h. in a vehicle. It will most likely be the first element of the mural that will catch the viewers attention. I didn't want the font to be identified with a particular period of time. Even though Roger Reiman is remembered for his many accomplishments in the 1960's, his career spanned up through the 1990's. 

Early in the mural design process, I kept picturing the type of lettering I remember seeing on high-performance automotive parts packaging. I also looked at motorcycle racing posters from the 1960's to the present day. But I kept going back to things like, NGK spark plug packages, GT-1 Racing Motor Oil, etc.

With all this in mind, I start working through my 15,000 font search. When I see a font that fulfills the parameters, I write down it's name or do a screen capture, and save them all in a folder.


I then assemble as many of the individual fonts into an Adobe® Illustrator® letter sized page that I can. I can now save this page as a PDF so it is ready to send to client if needed. I try to narrow the initial search to four or five pages of lettering samples. In this format it easy to see that only about half of the fonts chosen will actually be something to consider moving forward with. Here is one of the pages I put together for the main name panels during the exploration. 


I picked a couple of fonts from these pages and played around with some blending option in PhotoShop®.




I ended up choosing a font that I had in my system called Race 1 Eternals Chiseled Normal. The image below shows the original font and the steps or layers that had to be added to achieve four color chiseled look lettering. I knew I was going to eventually need all the colors on their own layer, so I took the time to vectorize each color or layer needed.   


Here are both names set in the selected font, with all the layers and color effects applied.


Script Font


In the original sketch that I created, I thought I would use a script style font for the secondary type.


On the first draft of the design, I added several phrases that express major highlights from Roger's life. As the design evolved, I was able to reduce the number of phrases on the mural by introducing them in other elements. The 3-time Daytona Winner phrase will now be expressed in the painted flags above the name panels. I explained the flags in more detail in Part 3 of this Design series of posts.

Initially, I choose a hand-lettered style of script because it has been used on many types of race vehicles for several decades. The forward slant and flow of script expresses the feeling of speed and movement. Once again, I went through the process of reviewing several thousand different script style fonts.


The script used in the mural sketch above is called Sarah Script and it was designed by Charles Borges. 

In the end, we decided to design a totally original hand-drawn set of phrases. Ted Turner, the project co-leader, is in the final stages of rendering the new phrases.

Just a bit about the colors we are working with for the lettering. We were thinking of introducing some kind of gold leaf element to the mural design. George Sedlak was known for adding various styles of gold leaf lettering to Evel Knievel's helmets, and motorcycle paint jobs, so we decided to add gold somewhere. 

The name panels are to be painted with base coat/clear coat automotive paint. We intend to use metallic base colors which will hopefully give a finished color that resemble and match the gold leaf. The script lettering will use some of the colors pulled from the main images. Most likely warm white, orange, and black.

In the next installment, we will talk about some of the final design decisions and perhaps unveil the final Roger Reiman Mural Design Concept.