The topic of this newsletter I decided upon was technology. More specifically, how technology was threatening, working with, and improving libraries. The overall theme I decided upon after picking my content was how libraries were going digital, and how they are struggling with the change of maintaining their core values with all this added technology.
My concept revolved around what the core value of a library was: reading. This gave me some great opportunities to play with typography. Because this newsletter focused on libraries going digital, and how they are struggling with the change of maintaining their core values with all this added technology, I wanted the reader to “struggle” (in a sense) a little bit. I played around with contrast of what good and bad readability is, and how to achieve that. For my typographic choices, I chose a typeface that would traditionally be seen as one with a high readability (using all lowercase, small x-height, nice round shape, etc.), but used it in non-traditional ways, like really squished leading, tracking going into the negative (in thousandths of an em), and overlapping of different typographic elements. For color choice, I chose the color yellow because that would enhance my concept of readability. Yellow on black and black on yellow make for strong contrast and good readability, while white on yellow and yellow on white make for poor readability. I wanted to make sure the way I was using “bad readability” could also turn around and give some parts of the newsletter good readability.
