By Randy Howe
Posted on Monday, September 16th, 2024
As we all know, some designs come together really fast, while others are not so cooperative. There’s usually something, though, that gets me started. This time it was that typeface—which is what usually does it for me.
The Flip Side is a gymnastics program for kids six and under that is part of Spectrum Gymnastics, who I’ve done a lot of work for over the years. It has its own entrance, and the owner wanted to identify that while giving the program its own image.
Type comes first
Once I had the copy and the details from the customer, I got online and fished for some type ideas. When I found Hyper-Demo Black, it had just the right feel for the design. It’s energetic, bouncy and fun—just like gymnastics.
It had several other things going for it, too. I played with it as all upper case then all lower case then upper and lower. All caps worked okay, but I found that upper and lowercase let me stack the words up and line up the midlines. Then the “P” and the “D” fit nicely together and the two “i”s lined up. Next, I flipped the one in “Side” which I thought worked well. There’s a lot of flipping in gymnastics, right?
There’s a certain amount of luck involved when things fit together so nicely like that. But you do have to be looking for possibilities or you’ll miss them.
I minimized “The” by stacking it up. It only takes up the space of a single character rather than three. That let me make “Flip Side” larger, and that’s our main message.
There are often words like “The” or “And” or “LLC” that need to be in a layout, but they don’t need to be big and loud. You can minimize them like I did here so that your main message talks louder. The word is there, but it’s subtle.
The secondary copy is Knight Vision. It’s very legible but has a fun twist to it. It fits the look. They had a round graphic that had to be included, so I tucked that in there. They also specified the colors.
When it was all done, I wondered how it would look if I rotated it ten degrees. I liked it, again because it fit with the idea of gymnastics. That became the final layout for the sign.
They also wanted a horizontal version for social media and other signage uses, so I put that together as well. On social media they use it on a black background, and it looks very cool on black, too.
Going into a project like this, I rarely have a preconceived image in my head. It develops as I choose the letter styles and how they work with the text. Then I go on to the layout and colors.
You always have constraints going into a design project. The first one is the copy itself. The words often dictate the design to some degree. (Consider a company with a short one-word name versus one with a three-word name.) In this case there was also an additional logo that had to be included, and the colors also had to match the parent company.
So you work with what you get. It’s great when it comes together and the design works. And a design project is always a nice change from the routine projects that fill up our time in most shops.
Randy Howe’s shop, GetZumExposure.com, is in Port Dover, Ontario, Canada.
