The Race Card Project
Typographic representations of three successful Americans with uniquely profound essays on their experiences with discrimination.
About The Race Card Project
The Race Card Project was established to challenge people to “distill their thoughts on race to only six words”.
I was impressed and inspired by three of the essays:
- Vincent Simon
- Brian Roberts
- Warner Squire
Typographic Design Process
My goal was to use typography to represent the essays' authors.
First, I brought the images into Adobe Photoshop and cropped them into 5x7 inch portraits. I applied cutoff filters to each one to simplify the image down to 5 colors, and then I applied a black-and-white filter to convert these colors to shades.
Next, I brought these images into Adobe Illustrator and used the Image Tracing tool to convert the images into a vector tracing result with the 5 distinct shades.
I used Object > Expand to convert the tracing result into paths. For each shade, I selected a path for that shade, used Select > Similar > Fill Color to select all paths with that shade, and used Object > Group to organize the paths by shade.
Next, I created a text box the size of the image and populated it with the essay written by the subject (repeating multiple times until the text filled the page). I duplicated this text box until there was one for each shade group.
For the text representing each shade, I set the font size and line heights to the following values:
Darkest Shade | Font Size = 3pt, Line Height = 2pt
Dark Shade | Font Size = 4pt, Line Height = 3pt
Middle Shade | Font Size = 5pt, Line Height = 4pt
Bright Shade | Font Size = 4pt, Line Height = 3pt
Brightest Shade | Font Size = 3pt, Line Height = 2pt
I added more repetitions of the essay as necessary to fill the text box after each adjustment. Then I set the color of the text to their respective shades.
Finally, for each shade, I converted the respective shade group into a compound path using Object > Compound Path > Make, placed the respective text box under it in the Layers panel, selected both the compound path and text box, and applied a clipping mask with Object > Clipping Mask > Make.
Colorizing The Typography
Once I came up with a color scheme (shades of blue, black, and light gray), I applied it to the images. (The pragmatic thing to do would have been applying colors before creating the clipping mask, but I had to un-make the clipping masks using Object > Clipping Mask > Release, apply the color to the text, and re-make the clipping masks.
I had an idea to us the American Flag colors (Red, White, and Blue) as the colors for the image, but with only 5 shades, I couldn't get the combination to work.
In my experiments with lighting in film, I discovered that using 2-point lighting with different-colored lights (i.e. red and blue) not only creates a great lighting effect where the lights combine, but creates a great shadow effect where one color lurks in the shadow the cast by the other color.
In future attempts at this kind of work, I'll try using a higher number of template shades so the transition between them will be less jarring (if I want to work with red and blue together).
