From the course: After Effects: 3D Typography

Why good typography matters - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects: 3D Typography

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Why good typography matters

Why Good Typography Matters? Well, Letterforms enable us to communicate. This means that the reader or user is actually getting a message, even before starting to read the text. Type forms critical first impression about your message. Let's take a look at this great poster by Craig Ward as an example. We can see two different typefaces here. A narrow, bold red which says, Bad Typography is Everywhere. And underneath, in Serif font, which is almost in the same color of the paper, we can read that Good Typography is Invisible. To me, it means that if you did it well, the message becomes transparent to the reader. He can still read what it says here, and in this case, you may need to work your mind around it. But even if the viewer doesn't understand anything about typography, I think the message is still going through loud and clear, and also very precise. I'm going to quote Ina Saltz from the Foundations of Typography, which is a fantastic course here at lynda.com. I highly recommend you to watch it. So Ina says that, as a designer, you want to choose a type style that best expresses the message you want to send. My addition here is that I've marked few of the words in bold. Once again, helping and directing the viewers eye to what I think is the most important words in this quote. Designer, choose, type style, expresses, and message. So even before you start to read it. Your minds scans the text and those words are jumping straight at you, hopefully, helping you to understand the idea quicker. Now I've got four main design rules which I usually follow every day. The design should be simple, memorable, communicative and pretty. I believe that if you are following these four rules, your designs are on the right track and should convey the message and easily understood by your clients or viewers. In order to illustrate it, I'm going to use a basic flight design. Which I actually did for this course. So this is it. Of course, we are going to dress it further, create some 3D type. And add some background element as well as animation and light. But before doing so, let's test those four principles to see if they're applied here, and how. Let's start with simple. Well, we can see some simple shape, basic ones, and also we are getting a clear message. Also note, that there are only two fonts here. Memorable. I have this iconic exploding shape, I have only word here and one tag line, hopefully funny which always helps, and this should be very easy to remember. Communicative. I'm using here a comic font, which we all know and understand. We also see these exploding shape, but we are getting the sense that it is not really exploding. I would even go and call it friendly design. Pretty. Of course, this is a subjective manner. But if you follow few basic design rules, such as tracking, turning, alignment, and a consistent color scheme, you should be on the right track. Again, we have plenty of typography and design courses here at Lynda, that can help you learn and master those principles. In summary, you should check your design in its early stages to verify that all four rules apply to it. If you are not sure, consult other people and make sure the message you want to send is clear before stepping into the animation stage. Remember, Animation won't improve bad design; it needs to work well while stationary first.

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