*Transcription Disclaimer: the following transcription was automatically generated, and may have errors, or lack context.*
Hello. Hello, everyone. My name is Alex Lazaris, and today is day three of five of our brand bootcamp.
I am overjoyed that you've made it this far. I am super excited for the rest of the week. But today we are going to be focusing on type.
Tomorrow is extending your brand and Friday we'll be bringing it into Express. So you still have a lot to learn, lots of great things to kind of be talking about today. We have so much to cover within type.
Type is a very complicated, very big thing. It doesn't have to be complicated, but it can very quickly become that way. So if you do have any questions, make sure that you come over to be.net/AdobeLive to kind of ask those questions.
I'll answer them in real time. Let me know what you're thinking, what you need. Happy to help.
We got 30 minutes though, so we got lots to cover. I see a bunch of regulars. Annika carol.
Natasha. Hello. Hello, everyone.
Jack. Hello everyone. Welcome to the stream.
I'm super excited. So without further ado oh, yeah, you don't know who I am yet. I'm Alex Lazaris.
I run a design firm called Lazaris. You can check out our work www.wearelazaris.com. We specialize in branding, brand strategy, brand design, brand creative, any type of collateral that you might need, we do that.
So without further ado, we'll do a quick recap of what we've been doing for the last two days before this. So the first day we worked on brand strategy, so you'll see is we've got this beautiful kind of synapse and overview of all kind of the three phases that I look at when I take a brand project on Discovery is getting in there, understanding the pain points, your customers, your clients, or your own project. Understanding what makes it tick, what can make it better.
The brand strategy is where you start to actually put the rubber and the road together and start to say, this is what we believe in, this is how we need to communicate and start to kind of figure out what that differentiation in the marketplace is. And then brand design, which we're going through with the logos from yesterday and the type today. This is where you start to really manifest that through your visuals, through the design language you're creating, through all the collateral you're going to be building.
So that's where they kind of start all to meld together. That's very exciting. We also went through Wordboards, all that great stuff.
I showed you some examples with my brand and business. We did a little internal and external audit of our business as well. And that was day one.
So you can go check that out. We did a mood board of things that I love. We also did yesterday, we did our logo stream.
So very fun stuff. We talked about what type of logos there are and why you might use them. In certain instances, and some of the pros and cons of each, as well as how to quickly create your own shapes to create the building blocks of your own logo.
We didn't really talk about it yesterday, but this is kind of our current logo, the Lazaris Brand logo right here. As you can see, a bunch of different rectangles. If I wanted to, I can go into the pathfinder tool really quickly and just merge them and build it as one unified shape.
And now I can play with it. The idea behind my logo originally, and I don't say it's perfect, this is very much the case of most firms and designers and creatives never have time to work on your own brand. You're always working on your client's stuff.
So we threw this together really quickly, many years ago when we first started, and we haven't looked at it or touched it or worked on it since. And you're kind of seeing how that falls apart. But the idea behind this concept has always been being the negative space or the theater.
So in this place, you could kind of have work folding in. You could kind of use this as like a viewport for a visual. Almost like if we were to take these two L's and put them together, this would be your viewport on a theater.
Maybe when you're looking at a projection on the wall, whatever, you start to see this brand come to life. I think it works better in motion than it does in just like a traditional static graphic design. But that's really fun.
That's a tangent for another day. We are going to explore this a little bit more tomorrow when we start talking about collateral and things that we can do for the brand. Today we are focusing on type.
I see. Adam says, I remember you from Twitch. Long time no see.
What up, Adam? How you doing? Great to see you again. Yeah, Twitch was many moons ago. All right, so back into this.
We're going to go straight back to our type. So I want to give you all a good little baseline around type for those of you who are brand new to brand design, brand new to design in general, we have got pretty much two big buckets of type. It's not exhaustive, by all means, not the only options you have.
But we're going to be talking about Serifs and San Serifs today. You can get into monospace, you can get into decorative stuff, you can get into script, handwritten, all these other types of things. But really, for the most part, you're probably going to be working within a Serif and San Serif for the 90% of the work that you're going to be doing.
So that's what we're going to be focusing on today. So if you're not familiar with the Serif typeface, serifs are the ones with these funny little edges on them, little hanging off bits at the bottom and the tops. That's how you know it's a Serif.
What Serifs are really good for is for making sure that it's easy for your IR to read. So editorial work, so magazines, newspapers, books, publishings, all that is super duper helpful for you to just read. It helps move your eye from one letter to the next.
And that's super helpful. For this header copy. Over here, I've got Adobe Kazlon pro happening.
That's what I'm using. We're starting to see a nice little contrast of type for Serifs and Serifs paired together to really bring your brand to life. Sometimes you might have a blog or something that's a lot longer of copy and you'll start to use some Serifs.
A lot of brands, especially in the digital age, have moved to San Seriffs and we'll talk about that in a second. But what I wanted to show you really quickly is these versions of these typefaces here. So again, not fully exhaustive.
There's a bunch of different buckets within the Serif world, but we're going to kind of start talking through these five buckets. So you've got old style, which is this left bucket here. I've paired a bold old style with a thinner paragraph copy as well, just so you can see how each kind of plays off of each other.
Sometimes you want to contrast, sometimes you want to complement them. That gets really hectic and confusing, probably for this stream. But specifically old Style fonts are kind of the original Serif typeface that came back from the mid 18 hundreds or 18th century.
Newer typefaces model on this original are also called old style, and that's totally fine. You can see how it's a little bit wobbly. It's a little bit kind of hand drawn.
If you were to kind of cut this into a wood block or a printing press, things like that, but also very organic, very easy to read and kind of keeps the eyes moving. We'll go through the modern ones. It's a new take on an up to date version of it.
So it's called modern. There's a notable difference between the thick and thin strokes of the letters. So as you can see inside of this, you've got very thin strokes and then you got very thick strokes and it creates a certain weight.
What you want to make sure is you're weighting the letters correctly for legibility and not just throwing random variables into your type. We're going to move on to slab Serifs. Slab Serifs.
These are my least favorite, but I have a lot of clients who love Slab Serifs. Totally fine. They're a little bit chunkier and thick on the bottom.
You can start seeing by their rectangular terminals at the ends, thicker, square rectangle SERAPs that are often bold and designed to attract attention, not to be used in large copy blocks. But guess what I did? I used it in a small copy block. All right, so black letter.
Okay, I chose probably the worst black letter ever for the sake of illustrating how difficult it can be to read black letter types. Sometimes black letters are typically pretty good for, like, a display font, so maybe you're using a big header or something. Big black letter gets into the realm of sometimes being legible, sometimes not.
Depends on if that's one of your intentions, what you're trying to inspire with your work. That's totally fine if you want to kind of fight that tension point between legibility and function. But block letters are also referred to as Old English or Gothic fonts, and they're very, very ornate.
All right, so we'll move on to transitional or Barote. These are also 18th century, when improved printing methods made it possible to reproduce their fine line strokes. So, as you can see, compared to the other ones, these are a little bit more thin throughout.
They still have the kind of counterbalancing between the thick and thin elements, but for the most part, just more thin as well. Annika says black letter is awesome for small display phrases. Yeah, exactly.
Like maybe two or three words, something like that. Really get bold and punchy with it. All right, so we're going to move straight into the San Serif section now.
All right. San Serifs got really, really popular in the early 18 hundreds. They were popular due to the clarity, legibility and advertising display when used, printed very large or very small.
San Serifs also become prevalent to display text on computer screens, partly due to screens being really hard to show the Serif details in small type. What I mean by that is when you start to look at the pixelation on a San Serif typeface or sorry, a Serif typeface, these tiny little things, these little terminals, start to get a little bit more like a half pixel or a quarter of a pixel is not going to translate well. So he starts to get a little bit more muddy.
And so what the San Serif typeface will do for you is give you a much cleaner terminal that allows you to keep it more crystal clear on your phone, laptops, all those things. This is now less of an issue than it was in the early 2000s. Now that every phone is like, Retina or higher, that higher pixel density is going to make things more crystal clear.
So now we're starting to see a lot more people leveraging Serif typefaces again. But that's kind of why it's been made really popular in the early 2000s till now. We kind of look at three different buckets in terms of the San Serif aesthetic.
We've got geometric. These are essentially based off of simple geometric shapes. We were talking about that yesterday with the logo structure and how you can start to build shapes.
I know that Claudia did a drawing with shapes class after I did the logos one. So you got lots of shape language tutorials yesterday. Perfect for you to get your starting point.
Geometrics are really popular right now. You're seeing a lot of brands like luxury brands start to embrace them more. Burberry just did their rebrand with one logitech, also did one with a custom type as well.
So you're starting to see this because they're looking for that scalability. They want it to work from everything from their social profiles to their website and they want it to feel consistent no matter what size or billboard, whatever size kind of collateral they're making, they want it to feel consistent and ownable throughout. And that's why you've seen a lot of people moving towards the geometric side.
The difference between that and the humanistic side is the humanistic side is trying to keep some of the architecture from the Serif typefaces that are typically moving our eyes forward and kind of keeping a cadence with each letter form. By doing that there's a little bit more of a human organic line shape happening on each element. As you can see, this U has a little bit more of just like a natural curvature to it and it has a little bit more like bumps if you zoom in super close to it.
But if you were to look at the geometric side you start to see that there's more perfect ovals happening and more perfect curves happening. Still not always going to be completely perfect but from the eye further out you'll start to see that and recognize it more. Grotesque are the earliest.
They include fonts like Franklin Gothic. These types are very similar to Serifs. Again, they get more and more so as we kind of look at the scale here.
One is very geometric, humanistic kind of is like in the middle and then the grotesque starts to really start to feel like a Serif version but doesn't have those terminals and so that's kind of the big difference with the Serifs. All right. Annika says do you recommend any books on learning typography? Well, I don't necessarily have a book off the top of my head, but I'll see if I can drop this in Chat really quick.
This is a great website for learning about ink traps. So what I'm going to show you really quickly is not necessarily about typefaces themselves but things to look out for when you're looking at a type. An ink trap was built literally to trap ink.
So you will see here at small sizes, when you put a blob of ink down on a piece of paper, the ink will spread. And so what they built was ink traps to kind of create like a gutter and it would keep the Christmas of the actual letter when you're printing. So this is super duper helpful, especially when I'm sorry, explaining it here a little bit better.
So this is an illustration right here of when you don't have ink traps and you're printing on the cross or this plus sign here if you don't have an ink trap, it's going to spread. It's going to spread out from the edges and it's going to start looking wonky. If you build an ink trap into your art like this, where it starts to cut into the X's here, that will trap the ink and it will give you a very crisp display like the one on the left.
You can start seeing ink traps here as examples of what ink traps look like in the wild. So you can start recognizing it. These are kind of some very specific ones.
You can see the N here as well. I have linked that in Chat, but if you need the website again tosh net blog inktraps, all kind of inktraps and pals all dashed out in between each word. That will give you a really robust case study on ink traps.
And then I believe they even start talking about digital ink traps and trying to design around screens with an ink trap with the same idea of like, light bleeding and negative light happening. So it's very fascinating. I think ink traps are really cool.
We've seen it in some really cool collateral pieces as well. Some brands, some companies, some type designers are building these exaggerated ink traps right now. And I think they're really fun and unique.
They can definitely make your type start to feel really interesting. So you can play them up, you can downplay them. If you have a typeface that you're working with for a client, maybe their brand or their project, and you see that it has an ink trap, but you know that it's not going to be displayed that way, you can look at each letter and say, do I need that ink trap? Do I need to resolve it? Do I need to change it, adjust it? This is stuff we're constantly doing as brand designers.
So just want to give you that light of the land and then we'll move on. So picking a tight face, that is the million dollar question. Let me just full screen real quick if you saw my designing for a tech brand video or stream for, I guess, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, something like that.
You'll see this list of typefaces all here on the right, sorry, on the left. Many of these are coming from the Pangram Pangram type bundle. So I'm going to give you some resources really quickly.
I start every project that I do pretty much with a bunch of different typefaces that I think will fit the mood for the time when we were building this one, I was trying to go with like a digital tech kind of retro, maybe feel. And I was just trying to explore things. So that's kind of how I do it.
I'll find typefaces in that and then I'll start playing with it and start finding a spot that I like from it. But if you're like, where do I start? Alex, where do I find great typefaces? Well, with your Adobe Creative Cloud account, you have access to fonts, dobby.com you can go into any of your programs and in real time.
Just go up here, go to your Character section. Sorry, go to your Type section and you can click Filter. You can find your classifications.
You can find San Serif, serifs Slab, serifs flung or Calligraphic black letter monospace, fixed and decorative. And then you can adjust by weight. So maybe I'm saying, okay, I know that my brand is probably going to be best with a San Serif.
I need something thick to probably match the geometric shapes that we've got from our logo the other day. And then you can start looking here. So what you'll see on this list is all the ones that you currently have installed, but you can also see ones that are not installed on your system yet from Adobe Fonts.com.
But you can also just go to the website as well and peruse. So right now it's a great way to go. Just fonts Adobe.com
and you can see what's trending, you can see what's happening sometimes. I always like perusing these sections because I might see something that I might say, oh, this highgate design is really interesting. I want to see the collateral system and how they're using it for some inspiration around how I could potentially use that typeface as well.
That's super duper easy. I love seeing it like this. You can start seeing the type actually in action before you even download it.
You can add it to Favorites if you want or need. You can also change the text size here. You can also click activate.
Once you do this, you immediately boom click it. It'll download immediately to your computer or wherever you're using your Creative Cloud on and then you're set. So, lots of great things here.
You don't need to activate all of them if you don't want, if you just want the black, italic absolutely, totally fine as well. You can also use Behance so oftentimes I'll just look pre month. I might just not do Singular.
I might do Singular free font instead. That's also a thing. And you can see what people are putting up in the community.
They'll have download links, they'll have everything you need. You can just peruse. I mean, look at this.
This is beautiful. Make sure you read the licensing and everything from these people as well. Sometimes they'll be open.
You see, it says Download for personal use by commercial use. Make sure that you're not ever putting yourself or your clients in an awkward situation by not adhering to your licenses. So just shout out to that.
These people have made it amazing and easy for you to use for personal use to do it. Make sure that you also don't break the rules around commercial licensing and things like that. But you can see, you can start scrolling through this and see how people are using the typeface and maybe what their intention was when they built it.
And you can start using that as like a starting point for your brand and your type choices as well. Again, super brilliant, beautiful work from people. These are awesome.
Like, great typefaces. You can just scroll through Behance really quickly, find them, find the download link, the reason why, the how, all that stuff that they've done and use that. So if that's not hitting your fancy, you've got free fonts from Behance and you got free fonts from Adobe.com.
You got free fonts from Google Fonts as well. Google Fonts is your friend. Google Fonts are free to use as well.
Go to Google Fonts, you can use those. You can also search as well and categorize them. I also have localization and really important as well for the Google products.
So there's a lot of great internationalization for all the typefaces. Great resource. You say, hey Alex, I really want something super duper awesome.
Maybe I want to try something out. I highly recommend the Pangram Pangram website. This is the one that I was highlighting like three weeks ago when I did that tech design branding project.
This is cool. They have it for $30. If you just go to their on the top, it gives you a font starter pack kit.
This is like for you to start using on your own for personal and testing usage only. $29. They give you some mockups.
They give you a bunch of really great stuff. It's awesome. You get like, I think 20 says all 31 fonts with over 300 styles, with 300 styles.
So lots of really great high quality work right there. $30 is really reasonable for like a type testing kit. Clem also does a test kit.
You can put in your email from Clem. They will email you a link, you can download it and sign up for the newsletter and all that good stuff. Again, personal use only.
And the testing files typically don't have all the customization or all the features that the paid version will be. But if you're needing to test it for yourself or test it for a client and you don't want to buy a 400 $500 typeface to start, this is a really great way to just start getting into the type and start exploring on your own. So hope that helps.
Now let's start seeing like, okay with the Lazaris brand then. We've got just a couple of minutes left. So if I know that this shape that I have is like super geometric, I've wanted to kind of counterbalance it constantly.
There's a typeface from Clem called Untitled Sands. It's a great piece. I think I probably want to leverage this together, kind of play off of it.
I can also probably make something out of that. That's really simple though. Maybe you want to do something custom.
If you watch my Sorbo Tequila designs, I used a typeface called TT Trailers by Pick the firm is True Type. I messed it up. I apologize.
All right, so what I'm going to do is here is just turn off my all caps and show you all the crazy things you can do with those. So with this, typically what I used to have to do is if you wanted to mess with type back in the day, you would have to go to right click on it and then create outlines. Oh, no, I'm getting a beach ball.
There we go. All right, so I created a beach ball. Now I'm good, though.
I now have this as an object. I created an object after clicking Create object. So it outlined.
Sorry. Create outline. Now it's a solid image or piece of type itself, but that's not editable right? So maybe I want to start playing with this typeface here.
What I want to do is I can look up for alternate Cliffs if I want, but what I can do is click the Touch Type tool. The Touch Type tool will give you a lot of customization. If I want to change a type, I can I can also shrink pieces.
I can play with it. I can mess with it in space. I can play with this piece.
Maybe I need this up like that, but I want it to hug the z there. Maybe I want to get this piece in a little bit closer. So now I have all this edibility and access without outlining, without breaking this typeface down if I need to, which is super helpful.
I can start to kind of play with individual elements out of it if I want. I can play with the width, the height, everything. I can just start to see here.
Just adjust this really quickly. Boom. Trying to keep it kind of close to same feeling size.
Mess with that there. Put this there. I'm still trying to keep the legibility of the name going just very, very quickly.
Might make this an I. And try to make it like a foundational piece, something like that. And move this Rush Type tool again and mess with it that way.
So you can do that. You can also mess with other pieces of it. Annika says Alex we're the font of you here.
That's true. I also forgot to use Comic Papyrus. And I'm sorry.
So let's do that really quick. Comic oh, no. I got my filters on.
So if you wonder what's happening and you don't see it, you're going to need to turn off your filters to see the things you like. Comic Virus. It's our favorite thing to use here at Adobe Live or on my channel or my streams.
All right, so we're going to click the Touch Type tool again real quick. Change the eye. Play with it a little bit more.
Boom. Perfect. Now it's feeling very messy.
This would not be a final logo. That I would ship to a client, but you can start to see between the two. You have a lot of options for a logo type if you need, but honestly, think about type hierarchy.
What I've tried to do in all of my spreads that I've been designing for you all is show you a healthy balance between your title type and your paragraph copy. Make sure you're leveraging it to be as legible and readable as possible. Having a nice balance and contrast between bold and regular typefaces is super helpful, as well.
Annika says, no way. That looks, dare I say, terrible about the comic papyrus. It's okay.
Comic papyrus is amazing. It's not for everybody, but it's definitely a fan favorite of mine. But make sure that whenever you're pairing these pieces, you have a nice balance between the two.
I know we have less than a minute left, so I want to just quickly pair maybe this with kazlon pro, and you can start to see, like, if I shrink down the serif typeface and pair it with a really nice modern san serif, it starts to feel really balanced, really legible. You got your titles, you got your paragraph copy. All that's right there for prime pickens.
But I am out of time today. Thank you so much for everyone hanging around. That was tight.
Tomorrow is your kind of brand expressions or collateral touch pieces, so make sure you come back for that tomorrow. Thank you, everyone, for hanging around. We'll see you tomorrow.
Bye.
