Grazie and Bob,

Way too late for me to concentrate on and respond to your efforts here - which I appreciate, But for now, a couple of things:

--- The "Forward" is purposely as close as a copy of the official Obama slogan and its typeface that I could get to without shelling out insane money to buy the font itself (can't remember what it is but found a facsimile at Dafont). And the "." is also how they have it. (Though now, they've changed the period to an... "!" - lol)

--- Below is the original "Together" PNG with its transparency. The "bumps" are not bumps, they are simply how the Rage font is -- brush script style. And the white is the highlight as stated earlier (since the light-source is coming from behind the lettering). Pop into Vegas or Photoshop and zoom in and you'll see what I mean.

So hopefully you can see why I've made the design choices I've made.
OK, off to bed I go.

Original "Together" PNG from design

So do I!

Well, it's beyond love, more like an obsession.

I've long recognised the crucial importance of how words appear on a sketch pad, or now here in video, that it must be some 47 years ago in school being blown away by the London '60s art and prior the Bauhaus and American movement in all things graphics & design. I'm still a font-worrier and terrorise the alphabet when I'm allowed out, or needed.

G

Philip, you're following a House-Style?! Ok, understood.

Cheers

Grazie

Last point - to 'splain my font choices:

-- The use of both fonts in the video intro is because they are in the poster/banner design - the point of the whole thing.

-- I've covered the "Forward" above, so now on to the choice of the script font: to give it a dynamic, well, forward motion -- with that imperfect human touch. The reason it's large is because it's the important addendum to the central official campaign slogan of "Forward."

And last but not entirely least, though I'm a life-long Democrat and this is for the Democratic candidate, there is a subrosa message in it of together meaning everyone -- whatever one's party. This country is sick and tired of political gridlock.

PS: In fact, perhaps one of the reasons I did not make the cut in the campaign ad video contest is that mine was probably not partisan or biting enough. The other entries were far more vocal and in some cases, very anti-this, anti-that.

I'm shooting for a more inclusive enough-with-all-the-fighting message.

And I feel that my design works well in that regard (this is the previous vector/traced version so a bit rougher in texture insofar as the background). And since the board re-sizes images according to one's monitor and browser resolution, this looks a bit rougher too (the original site image is only 764 pixels wide).

I also discovered that that my RGB work file is large enough to work for anything lower than a regular sized poster, and even there, it's passable.
And so vectoring may not be necessary in the end for hard-copy prints.

i still think the 'together' looks absolutely awful. i had quick look around but could find no 'official' example of the typeface?

Leslie, I'm left wondering what I had got myself involved in. I don't understand but I'm wiser.

Philip, I wish you well.

Graham

"i still think the 'together' looks absolutely awful."

Agreed. A week ago I wouldn't have believed there was such a font either.
It might look OK on a campagin poster but in video, no.

This is almost the same as a font problem I lost quite a bit of time on.
This graphic artist had designed a poster and program in InDesign and was kind enough to convert each layer to PDFs and package up all the image and fonts she'd used so I can use the same elements in the DVD slick, DVD menus etc. That's when the fun began.

She'd used a cursive font that looked totally different to what was on the poster. After a bit of pondering I reversed engineered her trick with it, she'd added an Inner Glow and Outer Glow. If they were just the right dimensions there it was.

That created another more insidious problem. The dimensions of the glow in PS are in pixels, so when I'd scale the font, oops the effect would blow up. For the DVD menus I got it almost there...and then I saw it on a HDTV, went back and redid the DVDs, all the fine detail was turning into an mess I've not seen before.

Here's the native font:



Here it is on the program cover:



The font is Stuyvesant BT if anyone is curious.

In hindsight looking at this very carefully I think she'd done something more complex than using black and white inner / out glows, InDesign I think has the ability to manipulate font vectors that PS doesn't, the ends of the lines in her work are different to mine.

Bob.

"The "bumps" are not bumps, they are simply how the Rage font is -- brush script style"

OK, now I think I understand what's happened.

This might be a bit much to digest now, keep it for another day.

"Rage" is a Linotype font, take a look at it on the website. When the font is rendered onto the page quite small the "bumps" vanish, at larger point sizes you can see them. That's the anti-aliasing kicking in.

Such a font is going to be very problematic in video, I cannot speak for every compositing app but Vegas seems to rasterize and then scale / move and that bypasses the anti-aliasing and the fine bumps become blobs. Ideally you'd want a full 3D app that manipulates the font's vectors depending on the scaling etc and then rasterizes to avoid the problem.

Bob.

OK, time to put this thread to rest.

I appreciate everyone's thoughtful and detailed input. I'll take some of the under-the-hood suggestions, techniques into consideration here on out in terms of how some fonts work in static mode but not so well in a video.

As to your consensus that my font choice for "Together" totally sucked (even in the graphic design it seems), I disagree and that's my prerogative as the designer. The only thing I may do is perhaps slightly soften the edges a bit in future work, but I'm sticking to the font and the design for this one.

~ Philip

Oh, and one last thing:

I mentioned above that I've found a little "cheat" trick to really reduce hard edges that are most prominent on text and in this case the infamous "Together" at beginning and in-design. Slightly cutting down on file resolution, which is a way to soften things overall by a smidgen.

I've created an alternate page to the later just-design presentation version:

- Player window and original resolution in those sinfully horrible versions according to y'all: 640x360.
- Theversion below keeps the player resolution but I've reduced the MP4's resolution to 90% or 576x324.
I could probably get away with something like 94 or 96% (got to keep things in even numbers.)

Seems smoother to me.
Do ye concur at least to some degree, oh Grand Yodas of Vegas?

"Cheated" version

"Seems smoother to me.

It does look cleaner.
One trick to smooth things that may work is to use an FX chain of Gaussian Blur > Unsharpen Mask. That will also enlarge the object, assuming it's on a transparent background.
You could also try is this.
Add Gaussian Blur to the "Together" track, keyframe it so the word comes into focus as it comes towards the viewer.

Bob.

Thanks, Bob. I've also fixed the still image for the video -- it was definitely off. No wonder... I had a 720 x 480 image in there instead of 640 x 360 so it got auto-reduced by the player script which always looks like, well... rat's whatever :)

And before I go...

All the discussion about font choice--including "Forward": as I 'splained above, my approximation via freebie while not perfect is one of the official one used by the campaign (looks like a screencapture image and pardon bad quality but this board blows up smaller images). I didn't include the logo in the "o" for it would have been a copyright violation.

In short, there was some method to my madness :)