Lanzarote calendar assignment: Revisited

- In a previous installment you were invited to redesign this calendar for Lanzarote Island. The full webinar of the results of your work can be found @graphicdesigntipsandtricks Facebook Live page. You could use any approach to the calendar you wanted, so some of you chose to use beautiful pictures of the ocean, others the unique lunar landscape of Lanzarote, still others the unique architecture of Lanzarote.

I tried my hand at this, too, and I would like to show you the results. I settled on a picture of the harbor. There are two things that I would like to point out in this video. One is how to work with the lines that are in the image, and two is my general preference for keeping type separate from the image. What I like about this picture, one, it's extremely horizontal, two, I like the way the clouds move through the sky. I like the horizon line created by the buildings, and I like a secondary horizon line created by the lit buildings just above the waterfront.

Of course, the foreground is placid and pretty. So, first step is to add space above the photograph. My first approach was a very Swiss style grid where I set the type in the upper left corner in, this is a variant of Helvetica, and drew guidelines, and then set the calendar type there. It looks arbitrary, it's not really, because I then added to that a picture of the Canary Islands so we could position the island in space.

I also like kinda the organic quality of these islands relative to the very mechanical quality of the type. What I like about this is that the type itself is a little bit generic. It goes with anything. You could use this approach for almost any visual topic, and the type tends to stay away, so the focal point here is really still the photograph. My next attempt was far more radical.

I dove into a 1970s style typeface called Macrame Super Triline. It has, well, you can see what it has. The thing I wanna point out here is how Calendar has been set on the photograph itself below the blue band at the top, and how the type is resting on the top of the picture. This seem like a natural place for it, and it's very designed this way. An option would be to put it at the top, exactly the same reason.

It feels quite intentional. Less intentional-looking is in the middle. It works fine, I like this approach as well. I like the typeface, but it's so different from the picture that it lacks a connection. I noticed, however, there's a connection, we could create a connection with color, the colors that are lit along that waterfront, so I picked some of those colors and added them to the typeface, which creates kind of a festive quality now, and a strong connection between those two elements.

From here I added in the Canary Islands. They're not quite as successful here, I think because the typeface itself is so radical. Third approach, more radical still, an extremely extended typeface called Design System stretching side to side across the top. Kind of automotive-like, almost like Porsche. Tucked the calendar type into the R, the 2017 white against the neutral field, Calendar, of course, dark against the neutral field.

I like this, it's similar in width to the waterfront buildings. But as I was looking at it, it looks a little bit too much like a ceiling rather than the sky being open, sort of inviting us into the sky. And so I swapped positions, putting the name at the bottom. And this is beginning to work. It's almost feeling now like a wall that we're looking over, the detail of Lanzarote is very similar to the detail of those buildings.

And one last step, let's do the color thing, pulling color from the waterfront into the typeface, love this result, and I think it solves every issue. The surprise for me was although this type is designed to go with this picture, it works with the others, too. With a small change of color but nothing else, it goes with the ocean, it goes with the lunar landscape, it goes with the architecture.

Very distinctive, works with the flow of the picture, keeps the type off of the picture. Those are the things I look for. And that's your design for today. Seeya next time.