Selecting a typeface for the bodycopy.

OK, so an impromptu crit with people like Tim and Dave lead me to the conclusion that the font I'd started working with (helvetica neue) was too heavy and didn't compliment the open and spacious nature of the font Dave had designed for me. The roundness of the counters and the thin line weight made helvetica look kind of clunky. SO I went about looking at a variety of typefaces, as well as playing around with leading and lines-pacing.


Above is century gothic at 7.5 pt, standard leading and 9.6pt linespacing. The roundness of the counters along with quite a low x height compared to the set width creates a nice even and symmetrical type face to work with. However, it did feel a little tight, so I'll need to increase the leading and/or the linespacing a little.

Above is New Circle, again it was reasonably well rounded, the 'w' in the font also looks like the 'w' that Dave had designed for me, which would create a nice parallel. My issue with this font is that even at +30 leading the font looked very tall and thin, rather than nice and symmetrical like Century gothik, creating quite an elongated feel that didn't compliment the title font too much.

AvantGarde was similarly rounded like century gothic, however the line weight and the sheer size of the bowls of the letters made it feel a little unnatural and very odd next to the title font for some reason.


Eventually following the process of putting the different typefaces next to the splash image to make a spread to see how they worked as part of the booklet I got to making a 'yay' pile and a 'nay' pile. The nay pile consisted mainly of clunky fonts I thought might work like Basemono, which kind of simulates a typewriter. I thought this might echo the sentiments of some of the people I interviewed who associated conspiracy theories with 'classified files' and things of that nature. Other 'nays' included gill, which looked far too formal and academic and p22 underground, which looked almost bold, it was fairly hideous to look at.





And finally some notes I made on the decisions I was making with input from Dave and Ian. I've decided to go with Century Gothic at 7.5 pt with 10 pt line spacing and +10 leading, allowing the font to breath a bit and balance well with the header font.