Bad Type Poster

Bad Typography

In my quest to find bad typography, I found this graphic poster on the boards of Concordia. There are two main typefaces used to portray the context of the poster and look similar to a standard serif font, perhaps Caslon, or Times New Roman for its important information, and a sans serif, Myriad Pro, for more technical information.

The poster is a Call for submissions directed at artists, to encourage the culture of collaboration. While the type is mostly legible, the treatment of the typefaces could have been better, where the type is being warped, which results in it not being true to its form. The constant fluctuation in italicization in “collaboration” is used as mere decoration, and does not help convey a strong meaning, but instead can be jarring at some points. Due to low contrast in form and size, it is difficult to focus on one piece of information in the poster and forces the eyes to bounce from one component to the other. This also causes some of the type/information to merge with the texture at the back giving it less legibility.

While the execution could have been better, the core idea is interesting, in breaking conventional typographic norms and has a playful vibe that I would like to integrate into my work and experiment with.