Typeface Spread—TRAJAN
Characteristics, personality, and flow
C-mini|2021
Part 1 Project Brief-
Through in-depth research on the chosen typeface, create a spread that explains the unique characteristics of the typeface with the use of fundamental principles of typeography in an effective manner.
Research-
The typeface I first picked out was Trajan, and I was initially very intrigued by the fact that it was all caps and how loud it was. It also looked very familiar, which I learned later in my research was because it is actually being used almost everywhere.
The adjectives that I would describe this typeface would be:
- grand
- loud
- stoic
- elegant
- classical
- ancient
- mysterious
- dramatic
- largely displayed
- main-character energy
- masculine
- might be overrated
- a bit extra
During my research process, I learned that Trajan was named after the thirteenth Emperor of Rome that valued the architectural aesthetics of public buildings, and its initial appearance is from the Trajan Column. Since the Romans did not use lower-case letters, Trajan is an all-capital typeface that holds the supreme place among letters for its readability and classic beauty. Its creator, Carol Twombly, was commissioned by Adobe, to create something that will eventually be utilized in signages and posters. For the grandest and most important inscriptions, Trajan was designed for display instead of printed text, and was brought to the digital screen to be used far and wide.
Looking back into the past decades of its usage, Trajan letterforms started to have a widespread presence on movie posters, television shows, and book covers because it conveys a feeling of importance, elegance and is very easy to read at a distance. Just about every genre of movie has at one time or another used the Trajan design for the main titles. Trajan is probably one of the most popular movie poster fonts ever. You can see it in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Double. Jeopardy, Letters from Iwo Jima, it’s everywhere.
After Trajan was introduced to the default Adobe typeface in 1989, it caught the wave of numerous movie industry professionals utilizing the Adobe software to make movie posters. When designers needed to come up with a poster, they just picked Trajan. However, the overuse of Trajan eventually changed the kinds of movies that used it, and it was not seen on big productions anymore. Now, it has become the typeface of indie horror movies, B-movies, and also the straight-to-video ones. The rise and fall of Trajan illustrates the downside of digital typefaces. When convenience takes away from the uniqueness of each movie poster, people start to apprieciate the hand painted style back in the day, when every poster was different.
Sources-
Based on this information, I then created a 50 word version of the information I gathered, which will eventually be the script of part 2:
In 1989, the film industry flourished and adobe needed a typeface for display, that is stoic and elegant—just like a hero on a journey. Inspired by ancient roman inscriptions, Carol Twombly created Trajan. All-caps typeface, bi-directional serif, low stroke contrast, exaggerated tails. Used in institution logos, video games, and movie posters of all genres.
Type Exercise-
Starting with body type font pairings, I used the suggested font Krete book from Adobe font reccomendations because it had good readability and matched the serif aesthetics for something classic and elegant.
Then I layed out different point sizes and leadings of krete book and krete regular to see which choice would be more readable in print. On screen, I thought size 14 was the most readable, but I was suprised to find that it actually appears much bigger in print. Krete is a very readable font, which made it very readable even at point size 8 or 9. I eventually decided that 9 over 13 was the most readable when my text boxes were narrow enough but maybe a 9 over 16 if the text boxes were long.
Ideation-
Based on the thumbnails I drew in procreate, I started to roughly create some spreads by using enlarged letterforms, cut out photos and illustrations, and marbel/rock textures. I kept the overall color scheme nutral for a more elegant and ancient look, and really wanted to focus on the textures. However, that was hard to create because I could not find free high quality textures online, and it did not look nice with the clean type.
Feedback-
- try to avoid spreading text across the page as that would make it harder to read due to the fold.
- It is better to present Trajan on the same baseline (aka its truest form) so it does not confuse the reader.
- the texture in the back is too distracting.
- add a drop cap to help lead the reader becuase it is being supressed by the distinct visuals.
- the glyphs are out of place
- play around with placement of text more, since 4 columns wide is the most readable. (out of 12 columns, start from the 3rd, 5th, etc)
- add page numbers or chapter titles to make it look more like a spread in a magazine
Based on the 12 column grid, I kept adjusting the color, scale, and placement of elements. I was still having trouble grounding everything even though they all followed a grid. After printing them out, I also realized that the background texture was still too pixalated, and decided to try making my own. Since Trajan is a type inspired by inscriptions in stone carvings, I wanted to recreate that look with 3d rendering in Maya. I eventually got to create the texture and embedd the big Q on the block, but it was still too hard to create a spread in 3d without the UI and functions of InDesign.
As a wise person probably said once, it is good to know when to give up. And so I did. I decided that this direction was not the point of making this spread, but it was still fun to explore. I realized that I should probably wait and work on learning these skills before I slap them on to other projects.
I then started to create vector patterns to fill out the blank space, but it still felt out of place, and some people pointed out that it looked like an owl’s face. I think it would be better to come back to this after the motion video.
Feedback-
- the swoosh on the right looks like it is part of the Q, which is missleading, there is a need to connect everything but maybe try something else
- the three adjectives in the middle are not grounded
- the print in the back is too distracting maybe intergrate it with the other elements a bit more
- the justified text has gutters and rivers.
- the chapter title and page numbers are a bit big
Coming Back to Spread-
After a couple weeks of pure frustration in animation, I started seeing new issues with the spread. Here is the process of these minor adjustments
Final Version-
Part 2 Project Brief-
Music-
I first started to find ancient Roman/Greek Music, but non were suitable for a typeface animation, so I asked the juniors where they got their music from, and they shared an open source library called bromeliad music. While searching for dramatic and mysterious, I came across the piece Indicator Species. The orchestral strings created a very grand atmosphere that was perfect for something like an epic movie trailer. the beat drop in the middle also provided a chance to make a suspenseful reveal that builds up and releases. It is a bit long, meaning more work, but it is a very snappy piece with strict measures of 4 that could not be cut down. As long as I stick with the beats and pacing it will make an impactful animation.
Storyboarding-
With the help of the 50 word script from part 1, I created a rough story board based off of the music. At this stage, I still wonder how I will incorporate all these images and illustrations into one coherent style, but I decided to focus on the text placement first.
Feedback(Vicki)-
- the text tends to drop when its the lower half of the screen, so think about text placement more
- the beats need to be filled in
- the font pairing is awkward with the san serif, so maybe use krete and make it beige because it competes with Trajan too much.
- the movie section is very long compared to the other two examples.
Composition Planning-
Falling sick during this time really took a strain on my productivity, and I only had text on the screen for a very long time. But based on this frame, I started to go into figma and plan out the visual composition of each segment and think about transitions between each scene. with blown up letterforms as the main graphical element and black and white pngs as supplement, I was able to create dynamic compositions that supported the text and filled in more beats. A grid helped me translate these compositions into after effects as the scaling is a bit different. At this stage, I was still changing my script a lot because it was really hard to fit to each beat while making every text readable.
I focused on how symbolism and color could help further tell the story, like the beat drop and connotation of text. An example that I really enjoyed was the “a hero’s journey” where the circle climbs up a mountain as if conquering a quest. The pops of red was revealed at the climax and provided extra impact for the grand reveal.
One layout choice that I felt was risky was the TRAJAN in the second image, where I used a lot of creative freedom. I know it isn’t necessarily the most readable option, but I enjoyed the aesthetics and I couldn’t find an alternate way with the amount of time I had.
Marble Texture-
The moving marble texture in the beginning and end went through a lot of iterations to make it them seam subtle and texturized in the video. I used masking and turbulent displacement to cover for the low resolution photo.
Effects-
I learned about the magic and great invention of animation presets from Langston, I can’t believe no one told me this. 😭 It helped with the fast beat sections and saved a lot of time. Langston also told me about how slightly zooming in pictures instead of keeping them static helps make the animation much more sophisticated.
More Feedback-
Movie Section-
After recounting the beats and planning them out multiple times, I realized that I could not adjust the length of the movie poster section with the amount of time I had left. I did want to bring more emphasis to movie posters anyways because it is the most known part of the typeface, so I just took three of the most famous movies and spotlighted them.
This section was the hardest to articulate as there were many glitches and assets to organize.
Putting it on the TV-
Here we have studio friends critiquing my video on the tv, found many typos, this is the third one already out of my 50 word script. 🤠
The beige color washes out a lot so I tried to make it more saturated in my file afterwards.
