My recent viz is a perfect example of why I got the telling rapper name of Lil Vizzie from Zach Bowders. Small visuals, a lot of everything else. This work has only two charts on the canvas, and everything else is centered around layout design. I saved this photo from Alexander Andrews to my favorites on Pexels months ago, but only today I found the most suitable font to tell a story. Have a look at the interactive version on Tableau Public, and read for the details.
I was casually browsing fonts this morning when I came across the Kodak font. The saved pic instantly popped into my mind, and by the time I blinked twice, Illustrator was already open. Kodak is a very abstract, hard to read typeface, so I’d only recommend using it for titles and subtitles. The letters stood quite close to each other when I first tried it out, so I decided to go with 25 pt tracking. Look at what a huge difference this small spacing makes:
What’s the difference between kerning and tracking?
In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning adjusts the space between individual letter forms, while tracking (letter-spacing) adjusts spacing uniformly over a range of characters.
To read more about these concepts, hop on to this Adobe article or Wikipedia.
Now back to photography
For a vivid font like Kodak, I decided to choose something simple for the text to balance out the effect. This time I went with Helvetica Neue Thin, which is such an elegant font, that even Kodak would dress up as Helvetica Neue Thin for the font Golden Globes. The rest of the visualization was just about proper layout design. Having sufficient white space on the canvas, the equal spacing of elements, aligning blocks on the X and Y axis can make a huge effect on the overall looks. Take the time to adjust these small details to polish your design to 100%!
Comments