So today, we found out what the US cover of Spice and Wolf volume 1 is going to look like. It is pretty terrible. It looks like either a terrible teen novel like Twilight or a terrible trashy romance novel that you’d pick up at some supermarket. I understand that you don’t want to publish a book with an anime wolf-girl on the cover, that’s fine. I’m not sure how a naked wolf-girl advances the notion that Spice and Wolf is quality stuff any better though. And of course, their offer of an alternate slipcover in an issue of Yen+ isn’t really enough to make me go out and buy a volume.

So in about five minutes, I’ve managed to think up a better cover design. The problem beyond the cover being terrible is how they plan to make covers for future volumes have the same look and feel. My ideal cover would be some sort of sketch or watercolour of the place they’re visiting, say a field of wheat for volume one or Rubenhaigen for volume two, and Lawrence’s cart somewhere on the cover. There, we have a classy cover scheme that conveys the atmosphere of Spice and Wolf, fits the target audience (light, fantasy, not trash), and can be extended for future volumes.

It’s baffling because their Haruhi cover redesigns were actually pretty good. The silhouette of Haruhi is recognizably Haruhi and the use of a bright solid colour makes it easy to distinguish volumes apart while keeping them visually consistent.

It’s unfortunate, because I was looking forward to buying Spice and Wolf much more than Haruhi. I guess that won’t be happening now.

Unlike other terrible ideas that no one liked, Waterloo decided it was probably not a good idea to press ahead with a logo that was universally loathed. In a rare moment of humility, they even decided to solicit feedback from real people. Of course, all this is for naught if the new logos are as terrible as the old ones.

AHAHAHAHAHAHA. It’s pretty terrible. （　´_ゝ`）

Here, we have the first new one. It’s a huge improvement over the other one. The most obvious criticisms of Unlimited Laser Works were the billions of lines and the billions of colours used. The first is taken care of by focusing on black and gold, the school’s colours. The second is taken care of by the slight tilt and cutting the top a bit. That conveys the dynamism or whatever without having tons of crazy lines flying all over the place.

I wouldn’t mind this one at all, although I think some explanation of the process and what it symbolizes would help make it more interesting. Of course, I’m not going to whine and say it’s too plain, because it’s worlds better than the other extreme.

At first glance, this one is kind of unsettling because of the way the E fits in with the T and R. But if you take a look on the stationary (the letterhead and the business card), those three lines becomes a really clever little motif that is really flexible. I think it’s a lot better than the random curvy lines that they’re using now. It’s also not too hard to change for faculty use, just by swapping the gold for a faculty colour.

I think this one grew on me and became my choice. The problem with the other one is that it doesn’t have any strong elements that could be taken on its own, so the use of the giant W is forced upon you. This one also has the advantage of a fairly distinct wordmark.

So it looks like my school is going through another major bout of rebranding. Since I enjoy being a pretend graphic designer (in between when I’m being a pretend political analyst and a real weeaboo), I took a look at what they’re trying to do.

The most interesting thing is that there was a more minor version of this happening not too long ago. It was essentially a style guide that mandated the use of two official fonts (Eidetic Neo and Solex) and outlined when to use them. It also had some stuff about faculty-specific marks. The biggest change was to the school’s logo, which changed the colour slightly and used the fonts that were being used in published materials instead.

This new rebranding effort looks a lot larger than the previous one and looks like it’ll be a significant departure from the current UW identity. The rationale behind this entire thing is that Waterloo is known for vague strengths like innovation, but not specific ones. Personally, I don’t see how rebranding will help that.

So there’s going to be a sneak peek at what the new branding is going to look like. The actual redesigned logo is not going to be used, but the elements and motifs are showed off in the banner that they put up online. Apparently, each of those is paired with an alternate design. I’ll have to wait until September or something so I can take a look at the pairs before I can say anything about those, but the black banner itself gives a few things to note.

The use of Gotham is interesting, mostly because of its use in recent history. Most people will not be able to unsee it once I point out that this is the font for the Obama campaign. In fact, the font weight used is about the same and they’re also doing the all caps thing. It’s really different from both of the fonts that they’ve been using for the past while.

The other thing is the colour use. Apparently, each faculty gets its own colour. The danger seems like it’ll be that no single one of those colours will be identified with Waterloo and that none of them will be recognized as the colour of a particular faculty like they’re supposed to be. I mean, we all know that pink is for Mathematics, but what are all the other ones? It is a mystery. The other problem is that I’m not sure that the other faculties have strong associations with a particular colour like Mathematics does. That makes the connection between colours and faculties a lot harder.

The biggest and most worrying change is probably the logo. Based on the direction that the other elements are going, there’s a good chance that the coat of arms might not survive. How would they make that fit in with all of the other funky colours they’re trying to shoehorn in?

I wouldn’t have tried to incorporate all six colours into one piece. If they were hellbent on mapping colours to faculties, I would have kept black as the primary colour, gold as secondary, and one faculty colour for tertiary. Keeping black and gold as the school colours would have been better than trying to associate six new colours, not all of which will appear together all the time, as Waterloo.

Update

Literally seconds after I hit the publish button, I find this:

Well, thanks for ruining my careful analysis, Waterloo. Anyway, if this is true, I really don’t know what to say. It is pretty much the worst thing ever.

I will never, ever understand why people think that Arial is an acceptable choice to use for something that isn’t a webpage with lots of text. I get angry when I see it. Unless you have a very good reason for using it, and you will know exactly when that is, there are only two other possible reasons that you use it.

It takes all of about fifteen seconds to analyze the text that you’re setting and choose a more suitable font. It costs nothing to acquire a typeface that works better with your text. If you can think of a sans-serif font that is legible, then 90% of the time, all you have to do is use that font instead. And believe me, everyone should know at least two, unless of course, you are blind. Knowing this, if you still choose Arial, then you are lazy.

The other case happens when you actually like Arial and think that it looks good. I can’t believe that anyone who understands design honestly thinks this. So, if you do think it looks good, you probably have no business setting any text to type at all. You should probably defer the selection of any typefaces to someone more knowledgeable in these matters.

Last time we were looking at worship slides, I talked about colour, which was a fairly simple place to start. Now, we move into something more substantial. We’ll be looking at type. In order to understand the importance of type, you need to understand typography.

Typography is the art and techniques of type design, modifying type glyphs, and arranging type. Type glyphs (characters) are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type is the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing) and letter spacing.

When I explain type, most people immediately think of fonts. The selection of a proper font to set your worship slides in is one of the most important decisions you have to make. Different fonts have different character and communicate different things. Good type selection will help add to the atmosphere that the worship leader is trying to create. Poor type selection will distract the congregation.

While type involves far more than font selection, it’ll be the focus of this post. Depending on your computer situation, you may have access to a variety of fonts, but likely only a few are suitable for use in worship slides. We will be looking mainly at the Microsoft core fonts for the web in detail, but we’ll also take a quick look at the new Cleartype fonts and other nice fonts in future posts.

The web core fonts were released by Microsoft in 1996 and are guaranteed to be on pretty much any computer. These fonts are Andale Mono, Arial, Comic Sans, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Verdana, and Webdings. That is quite a few fonts and chances are that Office will have unloaded about ten times as many fonts for you to choose from. We need a way to eliminate some of these right off the bat.

Remember our goals. Our choice of typeface needs to be easy to read. Immediately, Webdings is out, or at least I’d hope so. But, there are other criteria that we need to look at in order to narrow our options. We’re going to be reading song lyrics, so we’re not going to be using monospaced fonts like Andale Mono or Courier New. While they may be excellent for coding, they are horrid for regular reading, are too mechanical, and take up too much screen space. Following the same train of thought, Impact is disqualified because it is also not meant for body text.

But all of those choices above were fairly clear and obvious. We’re now left with the fonts that most people think are fine for use in worship, sometimes to my disappointment. Much of the time, this is because we forget that fonts have character, and that the font should match the context of whatever the words and music are trying to communicate. It is because of this that I cringe every time I see someone decide to set worship slides in Comic Sans.

But, we’ll begin with high school favourite Times New Roman. This actually isn’t that common of a font to use among people who’ve done slides for a while for the reason that it’s the font most associated with word processing and assignments. It is a decent font for print. On the screen, it isn’t horrid, but it’s not ideal. However, the main reason why Times New Roman is distracting is because of it’s association with work. This is especially true for student fellowships. We definitely don’t want to be reminded of that assignment we have due on Monday and we definitely don’t want to be causing these things to surface while we worship.

Comic Sans should not be a part of this group of fonts, but too many people use it. Understanding why Comic Sans, and any other font, is not appropriate requires us to understand the background of the font. Comic Sans was designed for use in children’s software and was modeled after comic book type. Practically, the fact that it was not designed as a general typeface means that it is a poor choice for setting body type. But more importantly, the informal character of the font conflicts with the context of our worship.

Trebuchet is a font that has been used liberally on the Internet, most notably as the choice of many blogging templates. While it’s not that great for body text on the web, it is adequate for use in larger sizes. It is a friendlier sans serif and much warmer than Arial is without being silly like Comic Sans. It isn’t ridiculously large like Verdana is either. Trebuchet is typically my font choice when there isn’t much on whatever machine I’m using.

Georgia is God’s gift to typography on the web. It is a serif font designed for being read on the screen. It is a very good font and an excellent replacement for Times New Roman for any document that’s meant to be read on screen. When it’s printed, it looks a bit large, but it does fine if you’re wanting to mix it up a bit. But if you need a serif font for those serious worship sets, you cannot go wrong with Georgia.

Verdana also sees a lot of usage on the web. This is because it’s ridiculously large size makes it really easy to read at small sizes. It’s not a bad sans serif, but it doesn’t fit our needs because we’ll displaying text at large sizes. Unfortunately, Verdana at large sizes is unpleasantly large and blocky.

Arial seems to be an inexplicably popular choice and I don’t understand why. The big thing about Arial seems to be it’s legibility and neutrality. What else would you want in a font? I don’t know, how about some emotion? Again, remember that we’re designing worship slides and we want the character of the fonts that we choose to be consistent with the content of the words. Choosing Arial works against our goal because it tries to be neutral when worship is supposed to make us anything but neutral. This is not to mention that Arial is a poorly designed font. At large sizes, it looks ridiculously empty and barren, which, again, is not consistent with our worship.

Simply going through the basic fonts just now has shown us a few things. You don’t need to amass a collection of premium type to create decent worship slides. However, it does require a lot of thought to choose the right type. But more importantly, this means that there is absolutely no reason to settle for slides with sub-par type. Even though we’ve only gone through a handful of fonts, you should be able to apply the same reasoning to choose appropriate fonts.

Also realize that the fact that most people don’t notice these things does not give us a license to typeset slides without thought. Again, approach the slides with the same attitude as you would a musician on worship team. Just because people can’t hear that you’re playing sloppily doesn’t give you a reason to. Many of these things about type usually go unnoticed consciously, but people can usually tell if something is off. It’s our job to make sure nothing’s off.