Old School

Project Brief

I think we're all a little influenced by what came before us - an era we didn't get to experience but perhaps one that we look to for guidance or for just a retro style guide. Take a look at one of my favorite sites to check out for unique typography and old-school design - hope you find it as interesting as I do!

https://typehunting.com/

You will need to take a significant amount of time to deep dive into this retro world.

Type Hunting started in September of 2012 as a personal archive of found typography by Jonathan Lawerence.

From Jonathan:

As a graphic designer, a lot of what I do on a day-to-day basis is inspired by this stuff. Some may just see this as a blog with a “vintage” design aesthetic, but these things are appealing to me because of how personal they feel. Back when a lot of this stuff was made, there were no marketing teams, no research groups, no gradients or yellow banners. People just needed things to look good and to be produced simply. People looked for little symbols, or phrases like “Open carefully here.” And for some reason, over the years, that personal feeling has vanished from a lot of the things we produce today. This blog is proof that these designs, and that approach, is a method of building things that last for lifetimes.

Everything here is 100% original content – found, photographed and curated by myself. Most of the things I find are busted and rusted, just falling-apart-old. My intent is to rescue what little bit of this treasure I can find, before its trashed and gone forever. I want to save it so that we can recognize it and learn from it, and hopefully, in some way, reuse it. 

You will choose two of these designs to use as inspiration in the creation of your own identities.

Learning Objectives

As a creative, you will be asked to achieve the following:

1. Illustrator pen tool mastery in creating a new/but stylistically mirrored look
2. Color choice selection by proper use of the eyedropper and swatch identification
3. Informed narrative writing defending your design decisions

Deliverables

One 11x17 PDF that is formatted in proper template style to showcase your inspiration, redesign, color choices, type choices and narrative

Readings/Resources

typehunting.com + demo video on design recreation + demo video on template page layout

Reflections

I believe this is one of the most successful and rewarding projects that I give in my typography class every semester. The results are awesome, it opens students eyes to retro design style and it pushes their creativity to borrow but still be original. The student, Cole Patterson, won a local ADDY Award for his Old School project.