A simple promotional leaflet for the Jane Austin Centre, hmmm I’m not so sure of that. While away I was looking around the tourist information centre and picked up a lot of leaflets of things to do in and around the Bath area, but this leaflet was ~not~ picked up for that reason; I picked this up because of the logo type.
Being a designer, especially one who loves, but doesn’t design type find myself looking at this and questioning the reason behind one specific detail: the placement of the initial word ‘The’ in relation to the rest of the type. Like most people I find the letter ‘J’ in either form, a nuisance as it has both an ascender and a descender, because you would not set it to the top of the x-height as the descender would be too long; whereas the bottom of the letter being on the baseline would be absurd as that just looks horrible from a typographical approach; and in this case the uppercase ‘J’ causes the ‘the’ to not be aligned to the left of the overall type, but left to be closer to the serif of the ‘J’ and not centered between the 2 capitalised letters.
The layout intrigues me, the reason behind its layout is baffling to me yet I still like their decision to do so, the central approach would give the letters a lot of blank space to float in, the left aligned above approach would make it look uneasy, so for those reasons I love this logo, the vector graphic set in that old style of cameos, the simple clean serif font (don’t particularly recognise it) for the name and the combination of the serif and sans-serif is a technique that I really feel that people should do more when applicable to the cause.
If anyone has any thought on this matter, please let me know, or even better – if you are the designer I’d love to hear from you about the placement.