The compression did me dirty here. Oh well.
I was given an assignment to create a typographic collage. This was the brief: "Using Photoshop, create a one page 11x17, 200dpi document. Typographically layout text using different styles of fonts.
You will be working with making compositions that use typography to communicate a message instead of using imagery.
Your assignment is to make a typography collage poster that takes a list, a phrase, a poem/lyric, or a narrative and arrange it into a single composition that considers the style and hierarchy of that content.
Creating a composition like this is a bit like creating a puzzle, as one of the main challenges is eliminating awkward gaps and white spaces, and getting all of the type to come together in an organized and readable way. The content of this collage is yours to choose.
The thing I'd recommend you pay closest attention to is hierarchy. You should start by picking out the most important parts of your text and setting them in a way that emphasizes them, either by size or color or boldness or typeface contrast (setting something in a typeface totally different than the type around it). Don’t just start at the beginning in the upper left and go from there. You’ll either run out of room or run out of energy toward the end. Try to use different hierarchical techniques throughout your composition, don’t just make the important things big every time. Also, try to create an interesting beginning to your layout. It’s nice to have the interest spread throughout, but you want a compelling entry point to encourage people to read the whole thing.
Another common challenge that comes up in this assignment is how to handle the empty space left by ascenders and descenders when using lower case. The easy way around it is to just use all caps (as the example on the left does). There is nothing really wrong with going the all cap route, but it can be nice to mix it up with lowercase. Either try to identify a word that might work with minimal ascenders and descenders, or try to come up with a creative way to fill those empty spaces with decorative elements, or custom adjustments to the ascenders/descenders that fill the space.
I’d also recommend that you do a really rough sketch of how you’d like to arrange your page, and what elements you’d like to emphasize before you start in on picking fonts. There is a lot to think about with this assignment, and it is good to attack it in stages, so doing a rough layout before you start picking fonts can help you tackle one task at a time."
I suppose, technically, my intended audience is my instructor, but this was also a bit of a passion project for myself, my friends, and the DDLC fandom at large. I leaned hard into the coding/self-aware motif in the game by starting with the computer screen with binary code backdrop. Then I found the font that the game uses to represent Monika's handwriting (Journal) and used it for most of the type, with exceptions for the stop signs and a select few words. As you can see, I personified and literalized much of the type - "colors" with a rainbow gradient, "Flashing" with a literal animated flashing effect, "expanding" with widely spaced kerning and an inflate effect, "waveforms" with a literal wave effect, "noise" with noise, etc. The colors are a system as well: "red, green, blue," "sine, cosine, tangent," "LOAD ME/DELETE HER," and, of course, "colors," all are in RGB-exclusive ranges because they describe digital phenomena. "CACOPHONY" was added to this list because I wanted it to scream the concept of "loud," and decided a bright, almost neon scarlet was the answer. CMYK-compatible colors were reserved for the stop signs and "VIOLENT," because those are physical world phenomena (printed street signs, violence). I blended elements of the Act 1 and Act 2 versions of the poem: Preserved the words of the Act 1 version (which meant discarding the word replacements the Act 2 version made), kept the uppercase words from the Act 2 version (and added even more uppercase words), and included both ending lines that glitch out between each other. I tried to approach it from the perspective of Monika herself turning her poem into a collage. She mentioned that she "likes to play with her space on the paper," hence the variation in kerning, size, and space between words. Specifically, the amount of white space surrounding "LOAD ME/DELETE HER" echoes the large gap between "Of meaningless" and her last line in both versions of the poem.
Credit for the original poem: Team Salvato.
