Text is an essential part of most designs. While legibility will generally be of greatest importance in choosing which fonts to use, the fonts will be crucial in bringing together the design.
Text can be used with few or any supporting elements to create designs of their own. Poster art has a particularly long-standing tradition of using text and fonts creatively.
As an example, consider this quote:
Art is anything you can get away with.
Marshall McLuhan, 1911-1980
The quote is interesting by itself. It can, however, easily drown on a page of text. With additional presentation in the form of a poster, it can become much more interesting.
In creating this poster, I wanted to create a powerful and dynamic feeling.
To set the mood, I drew inspiration from the designs of Soviet Agitprop posters. By using dark, yellow text on a deep, red background, the text pops out dramatically.
All words are set in all-caps. Because the words are seperated, this can be done without negatively affecting legibility. This also underlines the strength of the poster: A red background requires shouting, not whispering.
To a dynamic feel, I used two different fonts and two different categories of font sizes:
- Nexa Slab Bold for the key words, set in font sizes that ensure that each word is the full width of the poster. This is a slab-serif font that is very legible from afar, and which goes well together with the colors in invoking the Agitprop reference.
- Franklin Gothic Book for the remaining words, set in a much small font size. This is a very simple serif font, which does not in any way fight for stylistic attention.
By emphasizing some words, the quote will initially be read as “ART ANYTHING YOU CAN”. While this is not the full quote, it uses the smallest possible number of words to summarize the gist of the quote. Because this is not a grammatically correct sentence, and because the smaller text is still large enough to be visible (even if not legible), those who see the poster will likely be enticed to pause or come closer to read the full text.
The result is a poster that easily captures the eye and conveys its message, even at a distance and at a glance.