Art 240, Week 3.1: 50 Shirt Ideas

We were assigned to do 50 sketches for our T-Shirt project. Here they are posted late because I am a bad student. I chose the one with the cute spider.

Art 240, Week 3: Matthew Carter Shirt Design sketches

Here are some sketch ideas I came up with for our T-Shirt project. I have to make a shirt that has something to do with Matthew Carter that a "designer" would wear. What do designers wear? I don't know, hopefully my shirt?

Art 240, Week 2.1: Matthew Carter is apparently a big deal

This is Matthew Carter. He is a typographer and to other typographers he is very famous and important. Just think of him like the Typographic Elvis. He's a big deal.

He was born in 1937 in London. His dad, Harry Carter, was also a typographer, and helped nudge him into his career. When Matthew was going to enter college he was told to stay back a year so he could be the same age as his peers who were returning from the army. During this year off his father used his typographer connections to get him an internship at a printers in the Netherlands. Matthew used the skills he learned in the Netherlands to help him get his first freelance work in London.

While in London he begin designing typefaces which became quite well known. A good example of this work is the Bell Centennial font he designed for use in phone books. After some time in the industry he and some colleagues founded the company Bitstream Inc, which focused on designing digital type. He eventually left Bitstream with a partner to form Carter & Cone where he still works today. At Carter & Cone he gained much of his typography fame for designing the fonts Georgia and Verdana, which you probably use on a daily basis on your computer. In fact you are probably reading this very blog post on a font Matthew Carter himself made.

He's spent most of his later years having to sift through heaps of praise and sort through all the numerous awards he keeps winning. He is a senior critic in Yale's design program, and also won a MacArthur Genius grant in 2010 for his continuing contributions to type. Seven of his typefaces are actually in a permanent collection in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. So aside from being the typographers typographer and having his work used by millions on a daily basis, I guess he's had a pretty good career.

Here are some links I used to find information on Mr. Carter.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662385/typography-legend-matthew-carter-wins-500k-genius-grant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Carter
http://www.ted.com/talks/matthew_carter_my_life_in_typefaces
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_%26_Cone
http://www.macfound.org/fellows/28/

Art 240 Professor Mata, Week 2: Four Letter Word Project

We were given an assignment where we had to pick a four letter word and then write it however we pleased within a dotted template. We could only use black and white; and had to write the word in all UPPER CASE, all lower case, and one however we pleased.

I chose the word Kill, mainly because I liked the K and the straight lines of the L's. I hope my classmates don't think I am crazy.

Art 240 Professor Mata, Week 1, Six Letter Word Assignment and some Typography I like and dislike

Hello everyone,

My name is Michael Pfeffer and I am going to college for Graphic Design at Millersville University in Millersville, Pennsylvania. For our Typography 1 class we need to keep a weekly blog tracking our progress in said class. You happen to be reading that blog right now! Exciting!

Without further ado, lets just jump into some typography I like and dislike to get started. We'll begin with some typography I like. All of the proceeding images were taken by me and their copyrights are owned by their rightful owners.

 I like this typography because it has a pirate feel to it to go with the pirate rum and it all meshes well together.

 I enjoy the font of the Old Spice logo. I also like how the other fonts go well with the main logo font.

 These fonts are all clean and spaced well. It presents a clean eye catching design.

 This is similar to the last example in that the fonts go well together and are positioned cleanly.

 I really enjoy the font used on the birds little quip. It just feels like a font that would be used for a smart alec'y Groucho Marx pickle bird.







And now we get to some examples of typography I don't like that much...

It's strange how its all lower case, and it bothers me how it doesn't match.

 This is all over the place. A big thing for me is just for the fonts to have a similar look. If they don't it just visual bothers me. The mix of bold blocky font and squiggle like font just doesn't look right to me.

 Here is a certificate I got for donating blood. The one thing that really bothers me here is the font on my name. There are also some spots of random underlining and italicizing that just don't feel right either.

 The big thing that bothers me here is "Moisturizing." It just looks off. Maybe because it's slightly tilted, but perhaps they did that to catch my eye. This is just a nitpicking example, but hey I am just starting typography so what do I know.

 The mixing of fonts here is so blah. I feel like I am picking on TopCare here.

 The main thing here that I think is "bad" is how the g in "Beginner's" overlaps the P in "SPANISH." Why are they mushed together?

 This packaging just feels kind of cheap to me. Maybe because it is package of cheap body wash.











I want to finish my first blog post with an assignment we were given. We had to cut out a six letter word from vinyl and take a picture of it in an out of context manner.

I chose the word "Creepy" and decided to use it in a picture with something that wasn't creepy at all. I was worried my choice of a super cute frog might come off as ironically cute haunted little girl horror movie creepy or something, but I think it works well enough.

The hardest part of the assignment was the actual cutting out of the letters. Professor Mata gave us a little tutorial in class on how to do it, but I still had some trouble with it anyway.

That is all I have for today. I hope I did this right and look forward to learning more about typography this semester.