Experimenting with type.

 This is the finished product. If you're quick they will be around the streets of Bath over the next few days. It's a flyer for Bedlam Fair, which is a celebration of street theatre.
I wanted a slightly home=brewed retro look to the product. Initially I was going to propose using Letterpress or Risograph printing rather than offset/digital, but in the end this didn't happen because everything began running late. I did start to to a Linocut version of a map of Bath but this this was abandoned because it's almost impossible to update. (Although actually drawing the route on each of the flyers did also occur.
In the end I used a Photoshop Plug-in to give some of the images - notably the map and the Bedlam Fair masthead a retro look. This plug in replicates the look of cheap printing and provides a large number of controls to make the fakery look realistic. Of course, for the proper effect I would have had to use it on the whole publication, which was probably going to be unacceptable, so I didn't.

 This is a shot of the inside. here you can see the final layouts and colours.

Choosing Type
To achieve the look, whilst retaining the part of the brief that says "simple and easy to read" required some experimentation, testing and repeating the exercise and drilling down until a combination had been found. Of course, this is how I choose type - it's a long-winded process if I do it properly, but if it's for a series of similar products then if I get it right I can avoid having to re-do it every time a job comes along.

 For this job I basically need two or three typefaces: 

• A display face for the main titles, and possibly another for subheadings.
• A body type. I've already decided that I want a typewriter face for the body type - so the first job is to try a number. 

Must have tried around 50 display faces - the picture here is just a sub-set. Of the ones I liked, three were protected, meaning they couldn't be embedded into a pdf, which makes them useless. Nights taker was far too compressed for the size I wanted anyway. Candy turned out to be trial. Nice fnt, but quite expensive for just a few lines and the 'free' version I have has a very incomplete glyph set.

The same was true for "Mother Typewriter" and I noticed looking at the paragraphs of body type that I had the same face with three different names.

Here you can se some of the typewriter faces. Traveling Typewriter soon becomes the front runner. Not too grungy, has pretty complete glyph set. My other favourite, 1942 Typewriter,   has incomplete glyphs and doesn't work well at smaller sizes.

So here's a sheet of trials mixing up body and display. The Dymo like font has gone in and out of favour. I'm warming to it because it gives a fairly solid bar of colours. Useful for separating out sections.

Sketch Rockwell/Block (Name depends on where you get it from. - see this post) is liked by nearly all testers; but eventually dropped as it doesn't play well when used small. It also takes up a lot of space.

 More test, this time beginning develop and use colours. I've invented four, later six colours.

They are called:

• Mucky Cyan: c90/m0/y20/k10
• Mucky Magenta: c10/m90/y0/k10
• Mucky Yellow: c20/m10/y75/k0
• Flat Black: c20/m20/y10/k80

Later I added:

• Dirty Red: c0/m90/y90/k10
• Grubby Green: c50/m0/y75/10

These colours are desinged to simulate a poorly maintained press colours with loads of cross-conyamination. Additionally, as you can see from the front cover, I also simulated mis-registration. (bet this is going to make a printer look twice).
As you can see from the sheet here, at the end of this iteration one body style and one headline style were eliminated.

 This is the black version to check legibility

Here  you can see mucky Cyan working with a distressed display font. I quite like this, as do the testers, except for the spacing between the lowercase n and t. This face however is soon eliminated as it turns out we only have lower case and that is incomplete. Should have checked earlier!

One particular concern is how these work at smaller sizes. This test leads onto a later test, but already the writing is on the wall for some fonts.

Really like the effect of the Dymo lettering font in colour. Think it works well. But it's eliminated as too many heading will have to go onto two lines, or it will be too small to be read easily.

 Final two sheets of experiments. Been about three hours now - maybe longer if you count lunch and passing them around the table.
we have too winners; Veneer and Traveling Typewriter, The fancy type face that is the runner up will be saved for some heading (it was dropped in the end) the green became blue/cyan because that worked better.

If you enlarge this page you can see my notes as they were being passed around about the various typefaces.

Incidentally, I think it's pretty important, if this is going to be print, that these are printed out and looked at on paper. Most ink jet printers now give you a good idea of what's going on.

And finally, here's a rough of the layout, printed out and marked up for Saturday/Sunday.