Expressive Typography
September 21st, 2020
I used Adobe Photoshop to design an album cover for Trevor Daniel's Homesick album. I completed this project for my Visual Design 1 course that I took at KSU. For this project, I analyzed this design in a memo that describes choices I made for fonts, kerning, mood, layout, and typography. Design is an iterative process and I edited this design several times based on team critiques to achieve the final product.
I conveyed a mood of loneliness and nostalgia. The design appears as if the boy is wandering past the title and down the street. The title fills the entire top of the album cover and fades into the background image with a lower opacity. The position of different elements creates hierarchy and allows the viewer's eyes to move down through the design. Color and contrast play key factors in this design. White text contrasts well against a darker background. The artist's name is the same color as the suitcase and the title is the same color as the quote which makes the design cohesive.
While I used visual design and gestalt principles to create this design, typography is the main focus. I used BP Diet, a sans-serif font for the title, and Candara, a serif font for the quote. Since I used the same font for both the title and the artist’s name, the text appears cohesive, but the styles of the fonts are unique. All textual elements in the design are left-justified for easy readability. The title has a heaviest font-weight, the artist's name has a lighter weight, and the quote has the lightest. I edited the kerning of the text to make it more cohesive. Changing the distance between characters in the text creates balance.
