7 Optical Illusions in Type Design — Atricle

Igor Petrovic

Hi,

I wrote an article about the most common optical illusions in visual design:
https://nostalgicdolphin.com/7-optical-illusions-that-every-graphic-designer-should-know/


Nothing new for experienced type designers (already seen in Gunnlaugur Briem's notes or Thomas Phinney's FL video) but I tried to generalize the topic to draw the attention of graphic/logo designers.

Posting here aiming type design beginners. Cheers!

Yves Michel

Very nice article!

Christian Thalmann

Nice!

You might want to show the corrected version on its own in Chapter 5. It's hard to tell that it's working when it's drawn over the uncorrected version.

The corrected pill shape in the Bone Effect chapter still doesn't look too good, as you mentioned. You might want to show off the trick of tension offloading: Introduce extra on-curve points at the 45° points in the uncorrected version, then apply your correction to the curve-to-straight transition points. That should look more convincing.

Cheers, Christian

Igor Petrovic

Yves Michel said:

Very nice article!

Many thanks, Michel!

Christian Thalmann said:

You might want to show the corrected version on its own in Chapter 5.

Thanks Christian, this is a wise remark!

Christian Thalmann said:

You might want to show off the trick of tension offloading: Introduce extra on-curve points at the 45° points in the uncorrected version, then apply your correction to the curve-to-straight transition points.

This sounds interesting, thanks! However, I am not familiar with the technique. Do you mean that you would do the same as described in the article, except adding the on-curve points at 45° before the correction (and then removing them at the end)? 

Christian Thalmann

Don't remove them at the end, that would undo the effect... try it for yourself!

Igor Petrovic

I see. I was restrained by the reflex of considering on-curve points as a problem for interpolation. But that doesn't apply to logo design, indeed. Thanks!