The fourth project for my Typography class was to design an informative poster about either a typeface or a type designer. I decided to do a poster about my favorite personality in the design world:  the incorrigible typomaniac, Erik Spiekermann.

Erik Spiekermann’s designs tend to be very clean and well organized so I started this project with a few very simple sketches of basic grid layouts. Since Spiekermann is such a typomanic, and because this was a typography project, I knew I wanted to focus primarily on the type. 26 letters along with 10 numbers splits up nicely into a 9×4 grid. This seemed a good place to start from.

Once I had the basic layout of the type, I collected a few Spiekermann quotes and started looking for ways to incorporate them into the overall grid of type. I soon realized that spreading a quote out over the whole grid of letters was not only impractical, but would lead to a cluttered design. Instead, I only incorporated the name and phrase “typomaniac”.

The poster is set in Spiekermann’s typeface, ITC Officina, in a combination of Serif and Sans Serif. The text for the bio is directly from Spiekermann’s own website.

Filed under: Design by Ed

Topics: Erik Spiekermann, School, typography