For me, growing up in a house full of reggae records has made the Trojan logo as recognisable as the Nike swoosh, but with a ton of more meaning. It’s no coincidence that they also use a heavy robust and solid typeface like Rockwell Extra Bold.

The Universal Chemical Elements of the Human Body T shirt
Track 56: The Universal Chemical Elements of the Human Body
What are the elements that make up the human body?
The first question sounds a little metaphorical and will probably be addressed sometime in the future. But for now, the latest uchi track addresses the physical, or, more accurately, the chemical. I’m a science geek and a T shirt showing the chemical elements that make up the human body has been on the back burner of my mind for some time. It felt right to follow the last uchi T-shirt “Stereotype” with another typography design – contrasting, but also related. Think of it as the B Side to Stereotype.
The Brief
A T-shirt displaying the chemical elements of the human body.
The research
A bunch of stats from various academic websites to get the elements as well as each element’s mass (all with slightly varying approximations). I’ve since learnt that the exact amounts vary from person to person.
The design process
So how do you display the elements of the human body in a simplistic design? A graphical, infographic design? Maybe a pie chart or graph? Following on from ‘Stereotype‘, I thought “simple is best” and decided to rely solely on text and my typographical training to communicate the idea.
I wanted the names of each element to be printed in proportion to each other’s relative size. But this proved problematic, in terms of both design and print.
I’ve got about 99 elements but gold isn’t one of them
So I ditched the ratio idea in favour of a more aesthetically pleasing design. Starting with oxygen and ending with tin, each element’s representation would be slightly smaller than the one before it. I liked it. However, though simple, it wasn’t technically accurate. That was because the order of the trace elements was determined by the size of the word representing them – not by their mass. This bugged me.

Ingredients of the human body
