This is a typographic timeline I designed in second year of college. Please click on the version above for an enlarged version. This was before infographics became really popular, but I think it’s closely related to it. The idea of the project was to teach us how to organise, categorise and layout large amounts of information. We had to consider how to break it all down and how we wanted it to be be viewed. Some day I would like to recreate this as a proper infographic but try to keep it to the similar style.
The piece as I envisioned it was on a massive scale, much larger than I could printed myself. I designed it with the idea in mind that it would be hung in a gallery/museum as an educational accompaniment to a type based exhibition.
I really like colour coding information so it made sense for me to use a system like this. I also like to have order to my colours too so you can almost see them blend from one to the other. I knew I wanted my information to be read along a wall and that it would require the viewer to follow the information along the timeline. So to avoid bland repetitive parallel lines, I chose to create a concentric circle design at the beginning for an eye-catching visual.
Each line represents a different art movement. Art movements have more than just a style of painting to them, there is often a style of dress, architecture, film, dance or in this case, type that goes along with it. So with these art movement headings in mind, we had to compile our own research. I have the order chronologically, obviously, seeing as it is a timeline. We also had to decide how we would show that some movements come other the title of one grand movement, modernism.
So I broke the information down into the titles above.
When: Gives the time frame of the movement.
Where: Gives the main location where that movement based based.
Who: Gives the artists associated with that movement.
Typefaces: Gives examples of typefaces created during that movement, or in some cases, examples of modern typefaces inspired by that movement.
So the above close up of the time line shows information pertaining to the Arts & Crafts movement, Art Nouveau and Expressionism.
Each title then gets its own small background information on the history of the movement. Here, we can see the text for the De Stijl, Dada, Futurism, Russian Constructivism and Bauhaus movements. So this was the fact section for Dadaism.
The DaDa movement emerged in Germany as an anti-war movement & in many ways it was also an anti-art
movement. It began as a collaboration between the
artists of several nations who felt that European art was corrupt & sought a purity in mocking it. The name is believed to have been chosen by picking a word at
random from the French dictionary, which happened to mean hobby horse. DaDa typography followed the DaDa style, mainly consisting of various collaged letters.
I kept it brief because the if the piece as I imagined it was hung in a gallery or museum, then you would need the information to be bite-sized so the viewer will actually want to read it and can follow the text down along the length of the line.
Then above you can see the font samples. I chose one typeface to represent the movement and used six characters to showcase it. I used the alphabet from A to Z, numbers one to nine and then some special characters for the sample section. The movements visually represented by their typefaces here are Art Deco, Late Modern, Swiss International and Digital.
It's All Bright 