What do you do when one programming environment has better support for motion tracking, the other has better support for multiple videos, and your project requires sensitive functionality of both?

Answer to be determined.

[This is in case you want to skip the nonsense and just see the powerpoint.]

Oh, typography. I feel as though typography is one of those subjects that is easy to initially take for granted. Of course, once you do start looking into it, you want to smack yourself on the head for  paying so little attention to it before. Typography is about the art of choosing and arranging type, and here’s the point: the typography that you choose to convey some message may prove to be just as defining as the message itself. That’s a lot of power that these little black marks of curves and straight lines get to have. All the more reason to look at them carefully.

Below I have some images of my name in different typefaces, as well as a powerpoint that shows the same information a little mroe clearly. I was experimenting with what looked good with my name, particularly with the “Mimi” part. I thought that because “Mimi”  a.) is so short and b.) consists of only two repeated letters, it was a good litmus test for examining the different features that typographies can contain.

Also, I guess I’m not as self-centered as some may have guessed, because I thought that my name started to look so weird after I saw it repeated about, oh, 80 times (I looked at a lot of different fonts). Pretty interesting how seeing my name  repeatedly–a process that one would think would make me become even more used to it–actually functioned as a way for me to feel distanced from it. For example , after seeing it over and over (andoverandoverandover) again, I started to see the things that make people hesitate when they try to pronounce my last name. I don’t mean to be getting too anthropological up in here (oh fine, yes I do), but the fact that excessive exposure can lead to a defamiliarization effect is so counter-intuitive that I find it kind of exciting.

Ahem. Back to the point:

I like the modern feel to this font (CuprumFFU). Something about the curves of the letters, I think. I also appreciated that slight curvature in working together with how the dots on top of the “i”‘s are blocks.

Checking out the all caps thing in Ostrich Sans. I thought that it provides more of a statement feel to the name.

I didn’t like this one too much. I got the pen-stroke feel to it, but Ayita Pro felt a little…flighty to me. Still, thought it was interesting because it’s a sans serif typeface but look at how it’s playing with the idea of brackets.

I like this. I like the skinniness of the font and how it pushes the M’s and i’s together a bit more than some of the previous examples. Even though I can’t pronounce the font’s name, Gnuolane was a winner in my book.

And now, the serifs:

I started thinking about typography that leads you into focusing more on the words than on the font itself. I thought that  this font, Adamina, did the job perfectly.

More experimentation. I quite liked the effect of using the serifs with my name. I felt like “Mimi” is so short and simple that it really benefits from the added weight that the serifs give. This font, Playfair Display, with its high x-height, struck a nice balance between the lightness of some of the sans serifs while still lending the name some seriousness.

If you look at my powerpoint, you’ll see that I used Old Standard as a font. This one here is actually called New Standard. To me, it is the presence of the serifs that really modernize this font and set it apart from Old Standard–a fact that’s actually a bit ironic, considering.

And now something completely different. Mimi’s my nickname, so a lot of the time I don’t use it on more official cases (or even when communicating with some of my older friends, who call me by my given name, Chisom). I thought it was interesting to look at the ways that choosing between those two names could influence typographical choices as well. See this for example:

I’m using the script Scriptura Pro to make a point, but check out how the curvature behing the uppercase “C” and lowercase “h” in “Chisom” match that of the uppercase “O” and lowercase “h” in “Onuoha”. When I sign documents I use “Chisom”, and part of the reason might be because it is my official name, but hey, the other part might be because it just lends itself to flowery, expressive script.

Again, the powerpoint that I mentioned earlier. Same information, different format.