An experimental typography project that began with the label from a can of food, and deconstructed the available information in order to teach typography. The project started with using a single typeface and rigid rules and slowly broke those rules in an effective and methodic manner.
The project began with taking the text from the label and breaking it into primary, secondary, and tertiary information and then creating layouts and posters from that information in six separate phases.
Everything was created within a 7.5 x 7.5 square and a four column grid for steps 1 – 3.
I created lines and drawings during phase 3 and continued to expand upon them within the last two phases. I took a lot of photographs of beans, ranch dressing, cast iron skillets, western style shirts, carrots with ranch dressing, etc. But I really enjoyed finding images on artstor.org of old ranch-hands, ranch style houses, and people on ranches and blending the original image with a bit-mapped “screen print” style version.
I found this project to be extremely interesting especially when seeing how the same information can change based on the elements used. I never changed from the two allowed type families of Frutiger and Sabon. I found they were enough to explore variations.
I originally created section pages using photographs of beans with a gray background, and decided to take a risk and think about Ranch Style as something beyond beans, but possibly as a “prepster” brand of clothing or lifestyle company. This led to the final design of two perfect bound books held together by a colorful belly band.
