MERCER Project post

I used the Adobe Caslon Pro and the Gill Sans type faces for this project. I used the Caslon family for my word mark and headers, while I used Gill Sans for the body text of the document.

I wanted to use a serif font for the word mark because I was particularly interested in lining the serifs up in some interesting way. I really liked the readability of this transitional serif font and I particularly liked the serifs on the descender letters. I wanted to use a serif font with bracketed serifs so that there were some curves on the page. Notice how the serif of the ‘y’ in Whitney and the serif of the ‘r’ in Mercer sort of fit together neatly. I chose to make the letters all lowercase because I simply found that more appealing. The uppercase ‘W’ and ‘M’ did not look as readable to me. I made my first name black and my last name gray (67%) because I wanted more of an emphasis on my first name, since it is what I am known by. I used the semibold font in size 56 for the word mark. I leaded the word mark 27 pt. For the headers I used Caslon bold in 12 pt. and for the job titles I used Caslon semibold in 11 pt. Having the Caslon in all those areas created a visual Gestalt which helped tie everything in together.

For the body of my text I wanted to use a sans serif font that would provide contrast but still be readable. I chose Gill Sans because it has several postures and weights. I wanted to use a very thin and light weight for the actual bullets describing my positions, and I thought using a regular book-weight to list the position would create consistency and readability. Both the regular and the light weight were done in 11 pt.

I made my margins 5 picas on top, 4 picas on the sides and 6 picas on the bottom. I think these are a good middle ground- not too wide (which would create too much white space) and not too narrow (which could make the resume far too busy and difficult to read).

I didn’t want to have too much white space at the top of my page and I found this to be a challenge since my word mark only took up the upper left corner. I decided to create a bold line that extended from the base of the ‘r’ to the right of the page. Above that line (near the right margin) I listed my contact information in Caslon regular 9 pt. I thought it best to keep in the same type family as the word mark since I was so close to the word mark with this information.