Twinkle Jumani

Typography for non-designers: An interactive website

Abstract

Typography is a fundamental part of communication design. Type possesses physical attributes like size, width, and contrast and has potential emotive qualities like sophistication, accessibility, and warmth. Trained and formally educated designers have a better grasp of these nuances and are often more confident in their application. Likewise, non-designers have broad access to tools that can enable them to create their projects using typography. Often, they are unaware of the nuances of typography but aspire to learn the basics and understand how to apply them in their work. A non-designer may choose fonts that are less appropriate for a given context as type has subjective elements. I have created an interactive website that anchors the emotive and physical qualities of type in a narrative powered by gamification elements that can enable non-designers to learn typographic basics.

The first phase dealt with a pivot in the research question, which led to the expansion of the project's scope to be slowly narrowed down to the core sentiment of enabling non-designers to make informed type choices in their work and passion projects.
Research and informal discussions with non-designers were conducted to find a suitable method to integrate the knowledge of typography and its terminologies for non-designers which led to exploration of gamification elements.

Phase 2 concentrated on creating a symbolic anchor for the typography terms for non-designers by using gamification elements like a story, journey, progress, adventure. This led to a deep dive into character design and development, which was inspired by anime. The design of the characters was matched to the topics selected for teaching non-designers the basics of typography and spark an interest in the subject. Reflecting on this phase, creating gender-neutral characters was essential to justify typography elements.

Phase 3 was about bringing together the knowledge and the narrative to create ‘Camp type’- a camp where all type categories live. This journey would introduce typographic elements as anime-inspired characters and spark an interest in non-designers to understand the subject further. This world of type was tested for its usability with non-designers with positive results and a few tweaks to create the final interactive website. Human-centred design practices helped in anchoring the project to the audience and, in turn, its positive outcome.

Artefacts

Select Bibliography

1. Lupton, E 2004, Thinking with Type- A critical guide for designers, writers, editors and students, Princeton Architectural Press, New York

2. Kim, S, Song, K, Lockee, B & Burton, J 2018, Gamification in Learning and Education Enjoy Learning Like Gaming, Springer International Publishing AG, Switzerland

3. Van Leeuwen, T 2005, Introducing Social Semiotics, Routledge, London & New York.