Ctrl Space: it’s a great example of good fonts and graphic design. the fonts has the early 8- bit digital characters. there is a direct reference to computer language by using Ctrl instead of Control, [] in red also plays the double meanings, which is a shape of viewfinder.

it’s a very bad fonts. it speaks the old fashion Orientalism. it’s not to hard to see those typos around us.
it means you don’t need to know what it said. because you don’t care to see or nothing is worth to read. the fonts user don’t want to provide the right presetation of the others, etc.

BTW, you can find same racism in one of upper photos on middle east history from bookstore.

Successful:
My example of successful type is a freeway sign. I love that I can read it quickly, at a distance, and during all times of day.

Unsuccessful:
My example of unsuccessful type is also writing on a bottle, specifically a vitamin bottle. I bought new vitamins last week and it was a frustrating experience trying to decipher the text of the five bottles I was comparing.

The back of the Honey Nut cheerio box attempts way too hard to convince the consumer that the cereal is good for them. The yellow on orange color type is barely noticable and not attention grabbing at all. The crowding of the text and imagery also disrupts the viewer from remembering any useful information.

Now to the good one:

The honey bunch’s of oats cereal goes the opposite root by NOT turning the back of their box into a FOX NEWS news feed. and instead it uses simple sentences with correct color matching (dark purple on white, white on orange) and a proper and unified font proportion.

I feel this image does a great job of conveying the message (the name of the resort) with a subtle but effective style. Aesthetically it’s pleasing and gives a clear idea of the theme, and the layout isn’t cluttered.

Unsuccessful

This image (taken from a Barnes&Noble bag) is extremely unsuccessful in my opinion. I feel that it ‘tries too hard’ trying to convey the book them and really detracts from the name/branding of the store. The choice of colors and poorly gradiated shadings also make this look ‘muddy’ and unclear. I’m not impressed with the aesthetic at all.

Shown in the image is the cover of the book, ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’ by Edward Tufte. I think the cover (or for the matter the book itself) is beautifully designed and typefaced. Though the cover of the book uses a serif font that one sees everywhere, there is some interplay between the graphic, the title and the color of the cover that make it look less of a textbook and more like a collector’s item.

Unsuccessful type

Or generally, the 3D wavy, curvy, tapering etc etc font decorations that Microsoft thought was aesthetically pleasing. Maybe, we’ll talk about reflective logos the same way in ten years?

If the photos don’t display correctly, here they are:
http://picasaweb.google.com/demaws/AEST01/

2.Description of a product:
https://webfiles.berkeley.edu/emeliecheng/shared/CNM290_assignment/type2-1.jpg
https://webfiles.berkeley.edu/emeliecheng/shared/CNM290_assignment/type2-2.JPG
In this set, both texts are descriptions of a product in multiple languages.
On the first (successful) one, the information about this product is well organized to three rows. The designer manipulated three colors perfectly, black for background, orange for highlighted texts and white for details. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish the letters when the texts are small font size with bold style; but in this case, the font-size and bold are in a good balance. So the users can find the information they want easily and quickly.
On the unsuccessful one, there are 13 different languages with identical color in one piece of paper without any indicator or mark, so it really takes several minutes to find the language I know. The text is small while the bottom of the page is empty space – not a very efficient use of space, in my opinion. The contrast between the color of the paper and the text are too small to read clearly.

Bad type

- Cover of a book on Internet Denial of Service (DoS/DDoS) attacks. I don’t think that the type is very successful, as it neither truly reflects the seriousness of the issue (which the book tries to get at), nor do I think it poseses a uniform theme. The impression I get is that it was either designed by an amateur, or by a geek who does not believe in graphic artists.

Good example

- Cover of “SOM Journal vol. 3,” a periodic publication put by SOM Architecture firm, containing critiques of recently projects. The paper used in the cover is very glossy and the font is very geometric, giving a sense of what’s in store for the reader. The cover itself is very minimalist and tasty, but it’s hard to expect anything less from modern architecture firms!

This is a sign for the Middle Eastern History Section of Shakespeare Books on Berkeley. It is an example of effective typography due to the fact that you do not actually even have to read it to know what it is going to say. The font tells you immediately that it is something to do with subjects conceptually related to Arabic. Also, if the sign were actually in Arabic it would not be readable to most. Therefore this font does a wonderful job of giving context by shifting a recognizable cue and allowing extra information to be included.

BAD TYPOGRAPHY

The type face used for the Playstation 3 is not a bad font in and of itself. It suffers from issues of context. First, it is distinctive. This is, again, not a bad thing in and of itself, but when the PS3 logo happened to be announced very near to the announcement of Spiderman 3. Perhaps, if the type face had been less distinctive no-one would have noticed. But as it played out, the fonts are similar if not identical, and it is really obvious if you see them near each other.