Designing With Display Type: When Type Is the Image

All-type design demands the most from typography

When a composition has no imagery — when the typography is both the content and the visual — there's nowhere to hide. The typeface selection, the scale relationships, the spacing, the color, the composition: all of it is visible and evaluated simultaneously. Weak typography decisions that would be obscured by a strong photograph are front and center.

This is why all-type design is the most demanding typographic discipline and also the most rewarding. When it works, it demonstrates that typography alone has the visual power to communicate with force and beauty.

Choosing type with visual character for display use

Not all typefaces have the visual character to function as primary display elements. A typeface designed for text legibility — optimized to disappear at reading sizes — may look generic and uninteresting when blown up to 200pt and given no imagery to support it.

For display-dominant compositions, I choose typefaces with strong, distinctive formal character. Not necessarily complex character — some of the most powerful display type is extremely simple — but character that holds interest at large scale. A beautifully crafted grotesque with subtle optical corrections visible at large scale. A sharp-cut serif with extreme contrast that becomes a graphic element at display size. A text face whose small-scale warmth becomes monumental at display size.

Scale and the page as a field

In display-type compositions, the white space — the areas of the page without type — is as actively designed as the type itself. The type and the white space together form the composition. How the type sits in the field, how much space surrounds it, what shape the negative space takes — these are compositional decisions as important as the type's weight or size.

I place display type to create interesting negative shapes, not just to position it centrally or according to a grid. The white space that results from a specific type placement is either interesting or it isn't, and interesting white space is the difference between a composition that rewards looking and one that's merely functional.

The single-word composition

A single word at maximum scale on a poster is one of the most powerful typographic statements available — and one of the hardest to do well. The word becomes a purely visual form as much as a verbal message. Every curve and stroke of the letterforms is examined. The spacing within and around the word determines the entire emotional register of the composition.

When I use a single word at display scale, I work with it exhaustively: testing it in all caps vs. mixed case vs. all lowercase, in multiple typefaces, at multiple scales relative to the page, with different tracking values. The word as a visual form has a single optimal configuration for each context, and finding it requires genuine exploration.

Color in display type

Color in display type requires particular care because at large scale, the chromatic qualities of a color become intense. A warm red that reads as energetic at text size reads as almost aggressive at 200pt. Colors need to be recalibrated for display use — typically slightly less saturated than their text-size equivalents.