Design Something Everyday 15/365

I found a great arti­cle in Esquire wherein book jacket designer extra­or­di­naire Chip Kidd dis­cusses the think­ing and meth­ods that under­lie some of his recent work. One typog­ra­phy trick  that is par­tic­u­larly use­ful is how he cre­ated the dis­tressed text for his cover of Cor­mack McCarthy’s The Road:

The font is one of the old­est tricks in the book. You type­set text in a reg­u­lar font, I think this was Rotis, and then you blow it up really big on a Xerox machine and then you shrink it down really small. The trick is to see just how much you can dis­tress it and keep it read­able. It’s got­ten harder to do because Xerox machines are so much bet­ter, but if you’ve got a won­der­fully shitty machine it will look all cor­roded and gummy and yucky. It takes a bit of play­ing around, but it’s really not that hard.

With that tip as inspi­ra­tion I used the same tech­nique to make these lit­tle design posters. The type­face is Rock­well Bold and each let­ter was blown up 1600% on a Toshiba pho­to­copier, before being dig­i­tally reduced. The Toshiba was too new to give the type a truly won­der­fully gummy yucky look, but it was a good exer­cise. Even with all of our dig­i­tal tricks, it is pretty fun to get in there with some old school techniques.