TWIST - of Textiles and Type

As graphic designers, most of our days are spent sitting at our desks, working in various Adobe programs. Although that's a hell of a lot of fun, it's nice to be able to step away from that creative medium once in a while and use more traditional techniques instead. Sure, we'll use hand-drawn or painted assets in our work fairly often, but for the visual identity for this year's TWIST Fibre Festival, we went in a new direction and hand-embroidered the logo to really evoke the sense of handmade craft and fibre arts.

(When I say "we", I mean that I hand-embroidered letters, which were then used to spell out "TWIST". We have some shared skill sets, but needlework doesn't really fall under Nathaniel's purview.)

I used several different stitch techniques—from cross-stitch and petitpoint to couching and crewel, embroidered on both canvas and burlap with a variety of different fibres—so we had a wide range of hues and textures to choose from. Ultimately, we chose a mixture of embroidery thread for the letterforms, and assorted handspun artisanal yarns for the colourful accents.

It's funny... we can create faux versions of just about any texture imaginable with Photoshop and Illustrator, but there's nothing quite like creating the real thing by hand.
We're huge fans of authenticity, and since we're designing these pieces to promote a fibre festival (which draws knitters, spinners, and other fibre fiends from around the world), it was a lot of fun to work with needle and thread instead of just a mouse and a drawing tablet.

I've been doing needlework since I was a child, but had never had the opportunity to put it to use in a practical design application before, so this was a fabulous new experience in Winter-Hébert land. It was also nice to spend several chilly evenings curled up by the fire and stitching merrily whilst binge-watching British murder mysteries on Netflix and Acorn.

Here's hoping that we'll see you at the TWIST festival in Saint-André-Avellin this August!

A fibre festival with a... TWIST.

The nearby village of Saint-André-Avellin is home to the TWIST fibre festival: an annual two-day event that encompasses all that is wild and wondrous about fibre arts. Artisans and suppliers from around the world take part in this fest, where aficionados can indulge in tactile bliss and take classes or workshops to learn new skills.

We're delighted to design the visual identity for TWIST this year, so here's a peek at what we've created:

We wanted to put a new ...er.... "twist" on this year's designs while ensuring that the core, established identity was still recognizable. This called for several cups of espresso and many hours spent sketching out new ideas with pen and paper.

We refreshed the TWIST logo, using a hand-drawn, rustic Clarendon-esque approach instead of the faux-sketch of the previous version. It's complemented by line drawings of yarn balls and fibre-crafting tools, which also mirror the line-work of the lace collar that frames the main sheep's head.

Colour-wise, we went for fresh, bright hues in blue, green, and chartreuse, inspired by the hand-spun and blended yarns created by TWIST's founder, Amélie Blanchard of La chèvre d'oeuvre.

TWIST's typefaces:

And TWIST's... types of faces:

Sheep and rams and alpacas and goats and angora bunnies and and and...

It really is a spectacular festival, so if you like to fondle fleeces or transform roving and yarn into vibrant, daring items, don't miss it!

TWIST Fibre Festival
August 22-23, 2015
530 Rue Charles Auguste Montreuil
Saint-André-Avellin, Quebec
http://www.festivaltwist.org/en/home/

Concord, Contrast, and Conflict... Oh my!

Years ago, I worked with a young designer who always matched the same handful of typefaces with each other, regardless of the project he was working on. Despite the fact that we had thousands of fonts at our disposal, he inevitably just used those 8-10 options, and got really edgy and defensive any time he was asked to change them. One day, I asked him outright why he always gravitated towards those specific choices, and he told me that one of his graphic design instructors had used them as examples of typefaces that could be mixed and matched, so those are the ones he used. I asked him if he knew why his instructor had recommended those pairings, and he shook his head—he didn't remember the hows and whys of those pairings, so he refused to budge from his comfort zone.

Mixing and matching typefaces is a subtle art, but ultimately, the goal is to create concord and contrast—not conflict. Some people aim for the tried-and-true method of pairing a serif with a sans serif, or a sans serif with a script, but those rules can create some pretty heinous combinations if you're just grabbing them at random.

A better approach is to determine what type of feeling you'd like the text to convey, and then assign fonts that serve specific purposes.

Concord

You can combine fonts within a type family in a variety of widths, styles, and weights that work well together because they were designed to work together.

With these low-contrast type combinations, you really can't go wrong with combining the different weights/widths, but each style within a family should be used for a specific purpose: You'd call attention with bold, but place emphasis with italic.

Bottom line: it's a means of differentiating areas of copy, as it changes the text colour.

If we were going to compare this to fine art principles, it's like working in a monochromatic palette; adjacent hues that work with one another.

Contrast 

The opposite of concord, you're creating contrast by using different type families. The basic rule in this regard is as follows:
If you have a serif, pair it with a sans serif.
If you have a sans serif, you can pair it with a script.
As long as you're pulling from notably different type families, and not combining two that are incredibly fussy and ornate, you're probably doing something right.

Good on you.

Fine art comparison: opposites on a colour wheel. These would be hues that complement one another because they contrast and/or vibrate.

Conflict

There are many different ways that font pairings can fall into disharmony and conflict, and you want to avoid them... like pairing two different scripts, two different serifs, or two different sans: the general rule here is NO.

One big hellstorm occurs when there isn't enough difference between the typefaces you've chosen. As an example, I recently came across a banner ad that combined Futura and Gill Sans, and my retinas started to foam. This pairing is a case of conflict; it combines a geometric sans serif with a humanist one, and although some people might argue that the friendly rounded-ness of Gill Sans complements Futura's sharp, geometric edges, I think this combination is absolutely appalling because they look too similar to create contrast, and they look too dissimilar to create concord.

NO! Bad puppy.

If you're dead set on using two sans serifs together, then consider using two different weights or widths from the same font family, like teaming Univers roman and bold, or Garamond regular and italic.

Pairing Futura with Gill Sans is the equivalent of serving spaghetti carbonara with a side order of fettuccine Alfredo. Seriously? Serve it with a f*cking salad.

*Note: One caveat with regard to pairing different styles from the same type family is that you need to ensure that there needs to be at least 20% difference in colour to create a noticeable visual contrast. As such, you wouldn't combine ultra-thin with thin, or bold with semi-bold, because well, they're almost twinsies. They should each be separate entities that can be differentiated at a glance.

What are some of your favourite pairings?