As part of a college design assignment, I was assigned a font and asked to create a typographical poster that fonts.com could use to sell that particular font. The font I was assigned was Bodoni MT Std, and I couldn't have been more excited! Bodoni was a font that I had seen around before, but had never had the pleasure of using for any projects. I quickly discovered that the letterforms of the "Black" weight were my favorite, so I used them as much as I could.

I started with ten total compositional ideas (I'll spare you the rough drafts) and then narrowed it down to the three you see above. The requirements for the poster were that we had to show all of the font's weights, we had to reference fonts.com and give a price, and we had to include the name of the font's designer and a small blurb about the history of the font. While all three of these seemed like decent candidates, I kept thinking that #3 had the most potential, so I went with that.

From there, we were required to do 4 color variations, using no less than 3 colors in each variation. Here is what came of that challenge:

Feeling like any one of them could be my favorite, I polled my friends and family to see what their thoughts were. My wife noticed that I had darkened the letters that make up Bodoni's first name (Giambattista) in the second poster, and that instantly made it her favorite, as she's a fan of subtleties like that. My son's favorite was #3, as he just said "I like the colors of it." (His 4-year-old tastes have yet to be refined.) After more discussions and polling, I ended up going with #4, because I liked how classic, understated, and masculine it looked with the charcoal, gold, and white.

And that's the finished product above. Sized at 16" x 20", this typographic poster would look right at home in any creative's office; in fact, I'll be printing one of these up to hang in my office space in the coming days.