Source on Inspiration: Typography Design

One thing I really enjoy, design-wise, is when type is used to create a design element. A lot of company logos use certain letters or typography in such ways that they create a part of their logo or just some subtle message. I'm going to go through a few of my favorite typography design examples and try to explain why I like them so much.

I'm going to start with Tostitos's logo. You probably already know this, but the last two T's in the word Tostitos are supposed to be people dipping chips into a bowl that is the dot one the I. I like this because it is so subtle that most people probably don't see it right away, but at the same time it's so genius because it shows how Tostitos wants people to use their products.

 A lot of people probably already know this one too, but the white space between the E and the X in the FedEx logo creates an arrow. This one is extremely subtle, but still pretty cool. It just shows that FedEx moves stuff from one place to another using the white space between letters.

Hilary Clinton's campaign logo uses something similar, albeit not at all subtly. Here I believe that it's supposed to represent that Hilary is going to move the country forward. I'll leave my own political views out of this post, but I personal believe that Hilary has the best logo out of all the candidates.

Finally, the absolute best one is Amazon's logo. This is one that I would expect not a lot of people have noticed. The arrow under the word amazon starts at the A and ends at the Z, and Amazon likes to say that they ship everything "form A to Z." It's so stinking subtle and clever you probably never even noticed it, but it's amazing.

In conclusion, I get way too excited over clever uses of typography and am prone to geeking out whenever someone uses type to in new and creative ways.

Source of Inspiration: PSAC Blue

"PSAC Blue" is the official color of the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference. Its RGB values are R = 0, G = 73, B = 144. This is another color that I often use when designing things for The Rocket. Slippery Rock is a member of the PSAC and so I often use this color when talking about SRU in respect to the other PSAC schools. I like this color because I think it's a really good looking shade of blue. I also think it works very well as a background with white text or visa versa.

This is the PSAC logo and you can see the PSAC blue color is used throughout.

This is a graphic I made this week that was posted to The Rocket's Twitter. This particular athlete won a weekly award from the PSAC and so I used the PSAC blue color when talking about that award. I then used pantone 342 (Slippery Rock green) when talking about her individually.






I also use PSAC blue throughout the print editions of the newspaper, mainly when talking about things that happen in the conference or conference standings.