Design thinking and typography
Art & Design · Key Stage 3 · The School
Art and design
Art can ask a question and stop there. Design has a JOB: a poster must be read across a street, a sign must work in a hurry, a book must be read for hours without tiring the eye. Design is judged against its job, which makes it easier to critique honestly.
Hierarchy
Readers scan; they do not read layouts in order. Decide what should be seen first, second and third, then make that order obvious with size, weight, colour and space. If everything shouts, nothing is heard — the commonest fault in student posters is three headlines of equal size.
Letterforms carry meaning
SERIF faces (small strokes on the ends) read as traditional and set well in long text. SANS-SERIF reads as modern and clean. A heavy condensed face feels urgent; a thin wide one feels calm. Arabic calligraphy has its own developed scripts — Kufic angular and architectural, Naskh rounded and readable — chosen for exactly the same kind of reason.
A poster for a school concert. From four metres away, what can you read? If the answer is the decorative border and not the date, the hierarchy is wrong. Fix it: event name largest, then date and time, then venue, then everything else — three sizes, not seven. Now choose the typeface: a heavy sans serif reads as loud and modern, a script as formal and quiet. Then test it on a wall again.