By Xinran Zhao
For the expressive word project, I used Helvetica as my designed font. Before making the design, I knew nothing about Helvetica. I even hadn’t heard such name. However, throughout the process, I found that Helvetica is a big family that contains different fonts. Even they all named Helvetica, they all look different. For example, Helvetica light and Helvetica bold are different from thickness. Helvetica compressed makes less space between each single letter.
When I made the design, I tried to make the words look balanced and beautiful. By achieving that, I changed the size of each letter and mixed the capital and small letter. I want my design give people the feeling of comfortable. Besides that, I think the most important thing to make the design is to enhance the word’s meaning. Since different Helvetica gave me different feelings, I tried to use compatible Helvetica font to each word to enhance its meaning. For example, Helvetica bold made me feel powerful, so I used it to make my design of hostage. On the other hand, Helvetica light made me feel soft and gentle. Therefore, I used it for the word quite.
Good analysis of the typeface. Your solutions sound very thoughtful, but you might have misunderstood the project. You were to use only one version/weight of Helvetica for all of the words. not mix them.
While your design approach was fine, and very successful, the point of the project was to solve your design problem using only the elements of design, not a particular typeface, or weight of a typeface.