Can I actually make professional graphic designs better simply by changing the typography? We’re going to look at several designs that are pretty professional and high-end, and you can be the judge if the design is better or worse. I’m also going to review some of your designs later in the post.
So here is the first design and it was an advertising campaign for marmite. Now if you’re not too sure what marmite is it’s a pretty obscure kind of spread to put on toast stuff like that. The common consensus is that you either love Marmite or you hate it there’s no in-between when this stuff is concerned.
But what about this advertising design, what would you change and where can you see that it falls down and falls flat. So when I first saw this design the first thing that struck me was the lack of hierarchy in the typography itself.
It adds structure and alludes to the important parts of the design and this design has zero hierarchy in the typography section. Also, I think the slogan has been really lazily added to this design.
It’s kind of just slapped at the bottom like this and it just doesn’t look good, in my opinion. Finally, the layouts is something I want to work on on my redesign and that should complement my kind of typography choices. So let’s take a look and see what I actually mashed up for my redesign.
Because the design was the landscape I really did not like the top to the bottom layout so that’s the first thing I addressed. I put the marmite itself on the left and then the typography on the right.
I think this just looks a lot neater and it just makes sense to me as a graphic designer. Then of course we have the hierarchy, I’ve added the final line in white which is really striking. It kind of just adds that interesting factor to the design itself. I decided to forego the brown text because I just didn’t like it even though it, does relate back to the brand in some way.
Then finally I added up that slogan just below the main logotype, and this is the use of proximity it’s pulling together all elements in one kind of area that relate to each other and I put the slogan in a thinner kind of normal regular style font. But do let me know which one of these designs do you think works best.
Let’s move on to the next one so apparently “Heineken has great taste all your money back” I’m not sure about you guys Heineken isn’t one of my go-to’s when concerning beer or lager.
But anyway that aside what do you see in this design that could be improved and what do you think about it in general. I personally think even though this design is a professional design I think the typography is pretty lazy again.
There’s very little hierarchy and the alignment is kind of not well thought out either. I like the fact they kind of stacked it to resemble the thin shape of the bottle.
But I do think there’s a lot of room for improvement here on this typography. The designer also missed a trick by not including the red somewhere in the typography solution. Linking colors from the design to the typography is one really really great way to unify a design. The red would be something to create emphasis in the typography.
So here is my design on the right and as you can see I did make use of that red to allow the reader or the viewer to know that it’s coming soon because it’s right there striking you in the face.
I did play around with Antonio thin and Antonio bold for the typography, solution and that created some hierarchy on the “money back” and also the “great taste”. I didn’t want to change too much in this design, because I think the kind of concept was good as it was. I just thought the typography needed some tweaking and also, the use of that red I think really sets off the design.
But again of course let me know your thoughts down below. Remember that all of these designs were created by high-end brands and they must have hired a pretty high-end designer as well.
So next up we have a design that has a really good cause behind it, and that is promoting the awareness of the kind of lack of sanitation and basic needs in certain parts of the world.
Now right off the bat, I do like this color scheme and the minimal kind of design concept here. But I think that having the whole of this block of text in yellow completely doesn’t work. That is one two three four lines of text in yellow and it’s kind of a bit difficult to read. If that makes sense it doesn’t stand out in any kind of form of hierarchy. It would be nice to allude to the fact that one person dies every minute, and make that stand out as the main focus for the drill or the hook for the viewer to come into the design.
Now I did want to use their font because I think it does relate back to the illustration style. But I couldn’t find it and I didn’t have a font that was similar in my font book so I just use a sans serif font like this.
So instead of having four lines of text using the same color and same font, I went for three different lines and I used hierarchy in several different ways. I think it would look better if I had access to the font they used in the original design.
But as I said earlier having that one person dies in a bold different color and different size solution really does work and it’s really hard-hitting. Again I didn’t want to change too much on this design because I think the concept was really solid as a whole.
So we move on to a Gucci advert poster and looking at this design what would you guys change and what do you think needs to be worked on.
So what stood out to me first was the second and third line of text the smaller text, was positioned centrally in the middle under Gucci. I really don’t think this works and when in doubt guys a line to the left.
Also, I don’t understand why the text is in the middle of the design vertically speaking because we have a lot going on in the top right with the model and that kind of focus of the design. So I would like to bring things down to the bottom left a bit more in terms of the typography.
So here’s my version of the design. So I took their slogan and I put a really wide kerning solution and just put it below like.
So and then I used a different color and different font on the awareness slogan about, how the campaign is benefiting Unicef. Now to me this just makes more sense as a graphic designer. That is from various different viewpoints mainly being hierarchy proximity and balance. But yeah I would love to hear what you guys think about this design.