Bell Centennial: Characteristics, Personality, Rhythm, & Flow
Communications Studio I: Understanding Form & Context
For this assignment, I chose Bell Centennial as my typeface to analyze and explore. Bell Centennial is a san serif typeface in the industrial style that was created by Matthew Carter under AT&T’s commission.
Research & History | Understanding Bell Centennial
At the start of my research, I first began by reading up on the history of Bell Centennial, as well as taking note of its form qualities and features. I was most intrigued by the typeface’s origin, which stemmed from a series of issues that occurred when newsprint moved to offset presses and began producing poor quality text.
Bell Centennial was a typeface that was created to solve a contextual problem by making visual adjustments to its form.
Based on my preliminary research, I created an extensive list of adjectives that I felt were applicable to the typeface and descriptive of its origin and form. From that list, I selected three main adjectives that were most communicative of Bell Centennial’s characteristics:
Adjectives
Practical, Efficient, Straightforward
These adjectives speak to Bell Centennial’s emphasis on legibility and adaptive nature. Matthew Carter created a typeface that was heavily focused on communicating bulk information in small text while also making considerations to the limitations of ink bleed with new printing technology.
To condense my research and summarize the general personality of my typeface, I wrote out a short statement:
Statement
When changes to the printing press in the 1970’s resulted in inadequate text quality, AT&T commissioned type designer Matthew Carter to create a solution to the decaying ink spread and poor reproduction of print from high speed printing. With deep ink traps and condensed visual form for legibility, Bell Centennial was created as a means to overcome the gaps in telephone directory printing.
Bell Centennial Visual Form
Bell Centennial Features:
- Tall x-height
- Visible ink traps (visible with text in larger fonts)
- square dot over the letter i
- double-storey a; single-storey g
- narrow t and f
- horizontal top serif of 1
Bell Centennial Weight System
Unlike other typefaces, Bell Centennial’s weight system is named after the specified function in the AT&T telephone directories. The lightest weight is called Bell Centennial Addresses, a stroke weight specifically designated for printing addresses. The slightly heavier weight is Bell Centennial Caption, Bell Centennial Name and Number is used for name entries and phone numbers in the directory, and Bell Centennial Bold Listing is used as large and small capital letters with a heavier bold weight.
Bell Centennial’s weight system utilizes a nomenclature that is specific towards its function as a phone directory typeface and guides the designer through effective type hierarchy based on the name.
Typeface Spread | Exploring Thumbnails & Layout
After we discussed basic typesetting in class, I began thinking about ways to communicate Bell Centennial’s main takeaways through different visual layouts on the spread.
Because it was a difficult to visualize a composition with imagery without knowing what images I was using, I used a lot of thumbnails to play with the text alone (or title). Although it’s likely that the text won’t be so big or composition-filling once I work with imagery, I wanted to at least explore the idea of using the title of the spread to communicate the typeface qualities.
For my thumbnails, I took a few different approaches to highlight different aspects of the typeface:
- The deep ink traps in the letters
- “Phone book” layout with respect to its history
- Small body copy compositions to show legibility at small point sizes
Feedback from Vicki
Because I felt like the bold/loud nature of the thumbnails might have been pushing me in the wrong direction, I talked with Vicki about how I might spend my time working on proportions and type to effectively communicate the essence of Bell Centennial.
A few things we talked about:
- tone back the amount of space being used on the spread
- proportions can be applied to negative space as well
- thumbnails should transition better into proportion
- text is small, pristine, and functional; try to play to these features on the page
- restrain how much you are filling the page
Afterwards, I moved to InDesign to experiment with formatting my essay/body copy to the grid system.
After meeting with Vicki, I played around with setting type proportional to my typeface letterform by trying to allow my text adjustments to be more intentional, but I also had a hard time making my content line up to different letters.
After trying out a few different formats, I felt the readability for the content was best with the five column body copy as it didn’t have the “essay” feeling yet there were enough words on each line to maintain cohesive sentences.
Just to start transitioning into InDesign and working with full spread layouts, I made two of my thumbnails into spreads. Although I wasn’t planning on working with text at this size after my conversation with Vicki, they were still ideas I wanted to see translated onto a spread so I could make more informed decisions moving forward.
Imagery & Color
When I started working with imagery and color, I knew I wanted to orient my concept around the context of the typeface: printing press, ink wells, and telephone directories. To start, I created three basic color palettes to look out for during my image search.
For these simple color schemes, I knew I didn’t want a vintage concept for my imagery, so I set a few tones based on the Yellow Pages phone book and AT&T’s distinct blue tone.
During my image search, however, I found myself gravitating a lot more towards the black and white images that would pair well with a yellow accent tone. Using the body type from my previous explorations, I worked through 4 varying concepts to create different full spreads.
- Ink blotches; rows of small text
- Ink spread/movement
- Paper stacks
- Telephone
Feedback from Vicki
- Watch the first paragraph being different column length; doesn’t read as cohesively with the rest of the text
- Could add a touch of yellow on the ink spread option; could also make text closer to the ink to “pull the information in”
- Refine type; avoid widows and tab spacing
- For the telephone wire spread, the adjectives and lead in are both yellow which fight for the viewer’s attention; could also make the telephone work by turning image and trying different compositions
- “Bell Centennial” title should have same font sizes due to same significance
Moving forward, although I was drawn most to the ink spread composition, I also liked the imagery for the telephone wire so I first chose to play around with how that might look from different crops.
Although found myself drawn towards the bottom right composition, I was still most captivated by the ink spread image and concept as a whole. Also, when Vicki mentioned that ink and paper might be more relevant than the telephone, I definitely felt that working with the ink spread would create a more expressive and dynamic spread.
I first made minor adjustments to the body copy and wrote a new sub caption: “Efficient printing, sustainable ink.” While I felt like my previous one (Informative, Efficient, Honest.) was still relevant, the new sub caption introduced the spread with imagery better.
After fine-tuning the type and adding in yellow accents, I added in small details like image credits and page numbers.
Poster for Final Crit:
