Word Portraits

According to our book, "A font's voice could be authoritative, vigorous, poetic, urban, mechanical or eathy-depending on the design of the font and the perceptions of the viewer. It's up to the designer to choose fonts for their designs that will effectively deliver the layout's message" (241).

The purpose of this exercise was to create four images on PowerPoint. The main aspects to take into considerations were fonts and colors. The goal of this exercise was to create two images that the font matched a word or feeling and two images that the font contradicted a word or meaning. The design techniques used for this exercise were variations of fonts including Trebuchet and others while using all lower cases, mixtures of lower and upper cases, or complete capitalization.

Below you will find two images in which the fonts match the word: 

 As you can see the word in this instance is "Passion". The color of dark red and black font color create a sense of passion and energy, something that is often used in lust, love or sex advertisements. The font is curvy, which creates a sense of romance in that it is not straight edge.

The image on the right portrays the emotion or word, "Sad". The color blue is appropriate for the theme as it represents the "blues". The all capitalization of the word represents the intensity of the emotion.

Below you will find images in which the fonts and colors do not match the chosen word: 

This image clearly does not represent the word "Scary". The colors to portray the word are pink and yellow, colors that remind most people of happiness. The font is also in all capitals and in script font. Had this image correctly displayed the word scary the colors would have been very dark and uninviting and the font would have been in block style.

The word being portrayed in this image is "Bold". When people think of the word bold they think bright, loud and unique. This image clearly has none of those characteristics. The colors are plain grey and black. The word and font is very small to portray opposites.

Each of these images evolved from matching words to fonts and colors to contrasting the words with fonts and colors. What I learned from this exercise is that fonts and colors can truly make the message that a designer is trying to portray. I enjoyed this exercise very much in that I was able to use creativity and a change of imagination.