Choose the type

Ian Dury was famous for combining rock and roll and punk with the bawdy humor of Victorian music hall, and we wanted the poster to have a Victorian aesthetic — part circus poster, part music hall poster. The lyrics of “Reasons to Be Cheerful” are essentially a list of things to celebrate. As such it’s a great pick-me-up, and the rhythm of Dury’s delivery makes you see the words like a poster or advertising broadside.

What we’re after then is a mash up of a punk/new wave singer-songwriter and a Victorian poster. Makes perfect sense to us. On such Victorian posters, lists took precedence over structured sentences. This was the industrial age, and there were scads of mass-produced products to sell. The hierarchy of the poster — indicated by type size, weight, color, and devices like underling — made clear which items were the most important. But — and this is the fun part, EVERYTHING WAS IMPORTANT!

This desire to be bigger, bolder, and louder led to a typographic arms race, with larger typefaces needed to cut through the noise. The advent of wood type allowed printers to go beyond the technical limitations of metal type, which was too heavy and too expensive for use at large sizes. Wood type also allowed the use of typefaces that weren’t necessarily readable at book sizes.

Chaotic but charming, Victorian printing was characterized by the era’s love of ornamentation and has, perhaps unfairly, acquired a reputation for careless craftsmanship. Posters of the era are characterized by extreme variations of type size and weight. The concept of white space didn’t exist. The lines are crammed onto the page, every one in a different typeface. All the text is, of course, in uppercase. Make it bigger; make it louder.

With all this in mind, we chose a selection of wood types and for good measure threw in some typographic ornaments, which for ease of scaling were converted to outlines. There are also a couple of catchwords, THE and AND, and it wouldn’t be complete without some manicules, or pointing hands.

Formatting the text

Because each line is separate, we didn’t bother with paragraph styles, and anyway, a methodical approach seemed antithetical to the aesthetic that we were trying to channel. Each block of type was centered on the artboard with the Align panel. Fearful of white space, we wanted the type to fill as much of the page as possible, so reduced the size of the word spaces to 40%.

To create the chromatic text for Summer, we converted the type (Rosewood) to outlines and then, with it still selected, used the Shape Builder tool to change the color of the interior decoration.

For the offset and extruded drop shadows, we applied Live Effects through the Appearance panel so that the text remains live and so that the size and angle of shadow are easily editable thereafter.

Choosing colors

The two-color palette was inspired by a piece we had collected on our Pinterest board while looking for ideas. We deleted all unused colors so that we could concentrate on just those we were using and then converted both to global colors so that they could be easily edited, without having to select each item on the artboard.

Finishing touches

Once we were happy with the type — and especially the relative sizes of the lines and the spacing between them — we added paper texture on a layer above and set its blending mode to Multiply. (When in doubt, try Multiply!) To give the impression of show-through from the reverse side of the paper, we used an earlier version of the poster, reflected it vertically, and reduced its opacity until it was barely visible. You can see it, just to the left and right of Good Golly.