Life today is hectic and demands our total attention. Not every day is full of happiness; we all have our struggles big or small. We tend to become consumed in our everyday routines and forget to see others around us. Kindness can be an interaction with an animal, saying hello to a stranger or simply picking up the trash that fell from someone’s pocket. Kindness is simple yet powerful. One act of kindness every day not only helps others; it will help you feel better as well.
“Be nice to each other. It’s really all that matters.”
– Dawn Hochsprung, principal of Sandy Hook Elementary
A kind word, a smile, opening a door or helping someone carry a heavy item can all be acts of kindness. The incredible thing is — kindness is contagious. Try it! If you smile at someone, they will smile back and carry it forward by smiling at someone else. Your one act of kindness can snowball into several acts of kindness around you.
Typography design
This week I have taken the word “Kindness,” and with the assistance of Illustrator, I have used design to show what kindness means to me. I displayed feelings within the work by using color and design elements. KIND is empathy, as this is the root of KINDNESS. I placed a heart above the “I” to represent love and the “period” after KINDNESS to emphasize — it’s that simple. Kindness, period. You require nothing else except your simple act of kindness every day.
According to Landa, “type should always be an active contributor and can, in fact, express the entire message.” This statement summarizes my work this week in typography design. I am using type as the basis for my design to invoke the feeling of happiness, love, and the meaning of kindness in one image. I kept in mind readability when choosing colors and emphasis when selecting the heavy block letters in “KIND” using the font Myriad Pro. For the “ness” I used a script font called Serenity
from dafont, which brought softness to the design. The heart I drew within Illustrator to give a handwriting touch to it. The typefaces were chosen for contrast and differentiation while limiting the design to two fonts.
The word kindness brings meaning and provokes thought in the reader. By using a sans serif and script font, I have created an emphasis on KIND while bringing in the script font for “ness” to display a distinction between KIND and KINDness. I chose to keep it on a white canvas because the word is the design, and I did not want to take away from the impact. For this design, the type is the image and the message.
Have fun
Typography, when well crafted, can take an ordinary design and make it extraordinary. The more you play around with typography, the more you will realize the powerful impact that words achieve within your design. It’s fascinating and one of my favorite elements of design. Pay attention to the details in your favorite designs to pick out the typography impact. Have fun exploring the world of typography; you may see things a little differently now.
Resources:
Landa, R. (2019). Graphic design solutions. Australia: Cengage.
Holly Checchia 