Comments on: Typefaces and Visual Details for Teaching Materials

Question: Typefaces and Visual Details for Teaching Materials

Mngo — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 14:26:50 -0800

Need suggestions for graphic design elements related to 3 historical periods: early modern England, Neoclassical France, and the US in the cold war '50s.

For some teaching materials I'd like to choose appropriate (not necessarily strictly historically accurate) typefaces (ideally one for headings, one for body text) for each of these periods. I'd prefer free-to-cheap but I'm willing to invest a little if it's worth it.

I'd also like some small visual details to use as low-key accents, like lines across a header or section dividers (if I was doing classical Greece,for example, there's lots of line drawings of Doric columns, etc.).

This is for a drama course, so we're basically talking about the age of Marlowe, the age of Moliere, and the age of Tennessee Williams. IANAGD but I'd like to keep the three bodies of content clean and readable but visually distinct. Happy to hear any other visual thoughts (color palettes, etc).

By: Medieval Maven

Medieval Maven — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 14:36:15 -0800

We recently set The Merry Wives of Windsor in ~1956. The fonts used are Jungle Juice (free) and Century Gothic (which is on every computer I've ever turned on). We stuck with the idea of candy colors - the green you see there, and pink, as well as robin's egg blue with chrome details. The darker blue there you see was taken from a 1950's telephone (I can't find it again on the web but if you really want the hex I can get it for you).

By: niles

niles — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 14:39:27 -0800

A classmate of mine would type up cover pages for his Government classes in CarbonType to give it a Cold War feel.

By: bristolcat

bristolcat — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 16:13:00 -0800

For historical or retro fonts, I usually turn to Letterhead Fonts, a fantastic website with lots of rich, colorful examples.

By: bristolcat

bristolcat — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 16:20:32 -0800

Also, these Cuts and Caps from Briar Press are interesting little visual elements that may be similar to what you are looking for as accents. I think they are rather wonderful, myself.

By: kittydelsol

kittydelsol — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 16:36:19 -0800

Fun project! For the 17th century, Chapbook looks promising and includes a set of dingbats of things like animals, crowns, and cosmic elements.

By: oneirodynia

oneirodynia — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:56:18 -0800

1950's popular typefaces: Futura, Craw Modern, Monterey Script, or any kind of hand lettering, especially paired with something contrasting and clean.

By: Mngo

Mngo — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 05:51:48 -0800

Belatedly finishing this off--I wound up using Day Roman for 17c, Garamond for neoclassical France, and a typewriter font called Liecester for the 1950s (for those scoring at home, a-temporal text on the syllabus and elsewhere was mostly Georgia with some headings in Trebuchet--chosen because they looked good in the html version of the syllabus).

It was kind of goofy, but I actually hooked the literary history of these periods to the history of printing somewhat, talking about bookmaking in England, Garamond himself, and how distinctively "modern" it still was in the 1950s to write on typewriter.

Anyway, thanks for the tips!