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.
