Typography Assignment

For this week's assignment, we were asked to design words, using typography, to express their meaning. I decided to illustrate some common English prepositions, preparing a graphic that I will be using in my final web-tutorial project.

I designed the image for high-school students, with the assumption that the underlying concept will be fairly easy for most of them. These are familiar words, and can rather easily be represented with pictures. But rather than introducing prepositions through these graphics, I was hoping to introduce the assignment that students will be doing at this point in the tutorial. Students will be asked to create their own images, similar to mine, but using the Spanish words for the prepositions. I am hoping that the design decisions I made, coupled with the textual instructions I will write for the website, are clear to students.

Among the many design decisions that I made while working on this project, the most important concepts that I applied might be font choice (or typeface) and alignment. I played around quite a bit to find fonts that were easy to read (legible), while also complementing the meaning of the words. In particular, the flowing script-like font for "around" conveys a sense of motion, while the serifs in the font for "under" make it look a little like it's bulging under the weight of the word "over". I also tried not to get too crazy with "creative" fonts, based on the advice from our textbook, reminding us that "it may be wiser to stick to conventional and familiar typefaces than to employ idiosyncratic ones" (Lohr, 2008, p. 225).

The concept of alignment was very important for illustrating "around" and "to the right". For these images, I aligned the text to the edges of shapes, designing written words to also convey their related meaning. In this way, I used shape to enhance the instructional message (Lohr, 2008, p. 242).

Before posting this, I had my husband look at the images I created. He said that the words definitely represent their meanings, and that the result looks "hip but timeless and kind of retro". (Hopefully this will help appeal to finicky students that are used to nice websites.) He also said that the images are "punny", which can be an insult coming from him (he hates puns!), but was totally unavoidable for this assignment. So I am happy with my work, and didn't make any changes based on the user-test.


Lohr, L.L. (2008). Creating graphics for learning and performance: Lessons in visual literacy (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.