Hi everyone! Happy Monday. I’m going to veer off of my normal site schedule for a little while. I have some projects going on that are taking up a lot of my time, and my two week sick leave didn’t help matters much. So, this week’s new content will come at the end of the week in order to give me more time to work on it.

Today, I want to talk about the Black & White challenge from the Fribble Battle. (click the link for more details) Of all of the challenges posted, this one was my favorite. Maybe it’s because I have such a love for type and fonts, but I thought to myself – what a great way to really dig into the heart of design and push the limits of what you would normally do. The challenge, was to create a black and white poster that relied heavily on how creative you could get with font selection and placement. No photos, no layer styles, and outside of black, white, and shades of gray – no color was allowed. Simple illustrations were allowed, but for the most part, I wanted to see typographical creativity.

You see, far too often I have seen people trick out their fonts so much with layer styles and too many colors, that the information can get lost in all of the effects. Although I love layer styles and color just as much as everyone else, they can easily become a crutch and often I refer to them as "parlor tricks". Great to show off to friends and family for entertainment – but can easily turn tacky in the workplace. The idea of the challenge was to take away any designer crutches or parlor tricks you may be used to depending on and strip down to the basics of design to see what could come of it. Could you still make an effective, easy to read, and graphically beautiful poster?

After posting the challenge and thinking about it a while, I decided that I too should try this out. See just how far I could push my own limits with type.

Below is what I came up with. 

In my poster I have three brush stamps, three filler shapes in the chest and head of the waiter, and the rest (including the chandeliers and the bunting behind them) are all 100% type. My point? Type isn’t necessarily just for reading. There is art in every font, in every letter, in every point size. You just have to start looking at it differently.

Even though this challenge is over for the Firbble Battle, I want to encourage everyone to try this one out for yourself. Throw away your crutches and run with typography. Who knows, you just may end up with something new to add to your bag of tricks.