Identify details in font design micro-innovation sharing

Donald Young's profile:
Donald Young is a professional font designer, specializing in corporate and corporate fonts and font logo design, which can be said to be born in 1926 he is still alive in the world the most outstanding letter logo master. has been designed for a number of well-known corporate logo fonts, over eight years of his dedication to design and design education, from 1955-1978, from 1997 to now, Donald has taught art Centre College 46 ...

　　
Some of the small changes that have been made from tradition to modern cultural heritage, the letters we see today are almost the same as they were 500 years ago, and this relative stability is a consolation for Donald, who has been displaced throughout his childhood and looking for a stable environment. Maybe it's in the letters. He found a sense of stability that he could pin on, so he said that whenever he held a pencil, he was as happy as a child.

Most of the time, carefully select a set of fonts, this is a good choice for a product that requires a standardized application, because there may be more than 500 fonts available in one font type today, but for logo fonts, the fixed combinations of letters have to be designed for different projects.

When innovation becomes necessary, the meaning of innovation itself becomes more important. Sometimes we are too keen and innovative to redesign the letters beautifully and elegantly, allowing this trend to evolve, these words have become difficult to identify with the heterogeneous information, keeping a clear mind through the adjustment of the details of their combination into more easily identifiable and more certain characteristics and tendencies of the visual symbols, Perhaps this is the reason why the design exists.

The myriad nuances of innovation that create a better, more optimized, more recognizable font on the basis of existing fonts have some of the same characteristics as the Internet products we are working on today:

Each letter, the details of each interaction have the opportunity to be optimized, we continue to understand, analyze and weigh these small points in the process of design, a person or a team has a different understanding of each small point, different people will have different ways to deal with, Each point of the different processing will affect the whole product in a certain degree of character. Plus a time dimension, each minute has a different time, or a different time to see the minute, so the design seems to be a complicated and no end job. At this time we can not be irritable, do not worry, calmly to see the old man with a pencil on the paper depicted on the lines of the meaningful, smell a kind with persistent elegance bar.

First, introduce his three fonts: Home Run,young Gallant and young Finesse.

Donald described his focus on logo design: "It takes a lot of time to learn how to draw beautiful letters, I've been learning it since 1948, and I'm still learning." Drawing a good set of fonts makes me enjoy it, which may be related to the qualities I like to detail. "Although everyone says Donald Young is a logo designer and educator, he is happy to say that he has spent his entire life indulging in repeating letters, and he is so passionate about depicting them over and over again."

Donald has designed logos for many well-known corporate organizations, and here's what I've gathered.

Re-design in detail
There are so many good-looking fonts, how to have a new design? What are the reasons for the new design?

The simple answer to this question can be summed up in 2 words "Custom", the design of the alphabet will be for different tastes, different personalities, different states, is a unique logo. All companies need to differentiate themselves from other companies in the industry and need to fit in with the unique tastes of a particular group. Font size, spacing, structure ... Sometimes these subtle differences make a completely different impression. The design of a logo has a rich visual language, but even so to express an abstract concept requires a lot of effort. It is easy to imagine the difficulty of giving people a more friendly visual and cognitive experience by simply changing the nuances of the font.

This requires a lot of sketches to figure out all the details. Donald, who considers himself one of the proudest signs of the Prudential Insurance Company, has produced 1500 sketches in the process of designing it.

* This is the logo before the Prudential. Their current demand is to redesign a friendly logo font.

* A pencil-hand-drawn letter combination for a thorough understanding of the nuances of letters.

* Multiple font combinations, select the most ideal basic font. Century font is commonly used in American school textbooks a font, Americans think it is very friendly, not the font itself has any magic, but a lot of people's childhood is watching it through, which produced a kind of intimacy.

* People recognize the focus of words in the head of the letter combination. And for the foot of the letter is not so concerned, so need to optimize and redesign the place should be the head of the letter combination.

* The change of the letter A, remove the tail, reduce the space occupied by letters. Increase the "belly" and enhance the recognition.

* The change of the letter T, the tail elongated, the letter head elongated. Can be more easily identified in a combination of letters.

* The overall adjustment of the letter spacing.

* The overall test of the paragraph text.

Accumulation and inheritance

As a teacher, Donald always says to his students, "I don't care what the rules are, I know there are many rules, but my standard is what it looks like and it has to be polished over and over again until it looks impeccable." ”

"We don't have to innovate unless this change is good enough before it's done," he said. ”

Postscript
Custom services are becoming more and more of a trend, tailored to the need for more detailed design, find these details and do these details, need to accumulate the ability to deal with the details of the long-term.

"Once again, change the world" behind the countless small points of innovation converge into a new set of good products need good inheritance and persistent accumulation. Like a set of signs in general, products to maintain a unified product personality, give people a sense of stability, but also through continuous iterative perfect will be polished more and more excellent. The accumulation of different products, a belief will be recognized by users, an enterprise has been the user's respect.

Thanks for reading!