Kerndown

Kerning Branding and Grids

Grids - Rationalism
"It provides consistency, it gives an orderly look and it projects a level of intellectual elegance that we like to express.'' - Massimo Vignelli.

One example of a grid system used in popular art is Da Vinci's 'The Vitruvian Man'.

Albrecht Durer attempted to define the perfect grid system by adding a geometric grid system to each letter of the alphabet. Johann Neudorffer also used a geometric grid system to construct his typeface in 1660.

The Golden Ratio
The golden ratio devices a line into two parts relating to each other at approximately 1:1.618. When 360 degrees is divided by the golden ratio, the golden angle is revealed at 137.5 degrees. The pattern created by this angle is repeated throughout nature. Recognisable examples of this occurs on sun flowers, through the illustrations of Luca Pacioli in De Devina Proportione and on the former logotype of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Kerning
Kerning is the spacing between letter forms. How you construct a typeface will depend on the way you use kerning to evenly space letters from one another. Through the use of kerning we can determine legibility and meaning.

Studio group task
'Using up to 5 letters, create a logotype that represents the company types given to you'

1. A luxury car brand - Although our group decided to use close kerning, the feedback was that many others preferred to use widely spaced letters in their words. One example of wide kerning in luxury car brands would be on the Range Rover logotype.

2. A budget food brand - Again we chose to do close kerning, however generally budget food brands were considered moderately spaced out in terms of kerning.

3. A condom company - The idea was to present something that would look safe and trustworthy to the consumer, so we chose to use moderately spaced letters.

4. Indie bands - Indie bands tend to use quirky lettering on their album covers, so we decided to use the baseline of our word to separate the height of the letters in an unusual manner.

5. I.T. company - With the I.T. company we wanted to communicate the idea of connectivity so we used two capital letters that weren't too close together and not too far apart.