OUGD502 - Studio Brief 02 - Deuce Studios: Publication Colour Scheme & Typography

In terms of the colour scheme we wanted to make the report immediately linkable to Deuce. The easiest way we found to do so was to use their brand identity colours, which are very striking and attention-grabbing. The 4 main colours present on Deuce's online platforms were taken, as seen below.









In terms of the typographic style of the report, we wanted to keep it very modern, bold and simplistic. This is the main style that Deuce takes when approaching a brief, and is also the style that myself and Harrison try to keep to when working on Designbytwo posters.

The trip to EPS 51 studios in Berlin was extremely eye-opening to me in terms of their fantastic use of typography. One point that they made is that you should try to continue experimenting with different typefaces, rather than using the same one from brief-to-brief.

I mainly use DIN in most publications, because I used it for my self branding and try to tie in a part of my identity into publications. Whilst this creates an overall consistent, identifiable aesthetic, design outcomes can become boring and predictable. For this reason, I researched into various type foundries to find a new, different typeface to use in the report.

One modern typeface that I found is FF Bau. As Deuce use a sans-serif typeface in the majority of their designs, it seemed appropriate to go along with this style to keep consistency with their design approach. The main source of inspiration for choosing this typeface was EPS 51's Bi-Scriptual project, which uses a very similar typeface for the header and body type. As the bold typeface is quite heavy, FF Bau Regular was chosen to use for body copy, with the bold option only being used for quotes and headers.

One aspect of the interview that also needed to be considered was the typefaces Deuce picked for eachother. The three that they chose were Gill Sans, Rockwell and Bodoni Sans. As one design rule learnt is that publications should use 2-3 typefaces maximum for good consistency, these typefaces were chosen to be used as a one-off on one particular page. Rather than incorporating them into every page, there would be one page that explains who each person is, with their chosen typeface for the header. This ensures that the entire publication stays fairly consistent, and that the typographic does not become confused.

The 5 main typefaces used in the publication can therefore be seen below.

In terms of the sizing of type, the standard recommended sizes for A4 print are 10-12pt for body copy. Type is usually smaller, from between 6-12pt in magazines, as there is a lot of text and content. One pet hate that Jonny pointed out in the interview is designers that do not understand the use of space, particularly negative space. Because of this, we later decided to keep our content very condensed, so that paragraphs of type could be spaciously laid out on a spread. As the paragraphs are fairly low in word-count, I chose to use the slightly larger recommended type size of 12pt for body copy.

In terms of headers, 40pt was chosen. This was keeping to Vignelli's rule that headers should be two or 3 times the size of the body copy (plus leading space). For the leading, it is recommended that line spacing is set to 120-145% of the point size. This resulted in body copy being 12pt in size, with 16pt leading, and headers being 40pt in size, with 54pt leading.