Drawing 6 - Final alphabet

In this session we had to finalise one of our typefaces. i chose my 'Muddy' styled typefaces to be finalised , this involved drawing it up on a bigger scale , making sure all the letters were the same dimensions to retain the style. i felt that this font was detailed enough to take forward as my final design as there was a lot of potential for the font to be adapted. My past designs all inspired this typeface , using a variation of sketches allowed me to have a large amount of choice when picking a final idea.

Once i had finalised my design i proceeded to adapt it to a phrase. this proved to be more difficult as i had to recreate the typeface with no guidance. However overall i feel that each letter worked well together and provided flow through the words. non of the letters looked wrong and out of place therefore creating a successful type style. 

The typography workshops have helped me massively and allowed me to start looking into designing my own type , although early stages of this skill i feel that there is lots of potential , and eventually , with time i will be able to create my own typefaces for future projects. 

Drawing 5 - Constructing Alphabets

This session involved looking further into typography by producing three different rough sketches of typefaces. we would then choose to finalise one of these ideas and produced a refined version of the typography for our final typography session. i enjoyed this task as it allowed me to produce some quick fire typography ideas. this session allowed my mind to work fast and draw freely as the sketches only had to be rough. I made sure the designs i produced were very different styles so i had lots of variation to work with.

 My first rough typeface was very circular based. i wanted to keep all lettering within a 3x3 gridded circle to retain the style. I enjoyed creating this font as it was very different to conventional typefaces. one thing that i struggled with was creating this type quickly producing each letter , this proved to be fairly difficult and took quite long to create. i particularly struggled with getting each part of the circle equally spaced to retain the shapes consistency therefore i will most likely not be continuing with this font style.

 This typeface is a more simplistic Sans serif style , my aim was to not connect any of the parts of the type and use only straight lines and curves to create a sleek looking layout. This type reminds me of something that is stencil based and could be spray painted onto a wall. this font was a lot easier to produce than previous typefaces and i feel that it could be adapted into becoming quite a consistent lettering style.

This is my final typeface that i produced for the quick sketches , i wanted to try a more cartoon style typeface. this font gives off a muddy/slime feel to it , i added lines that made the text look as if it was melting in places. i feel like i will take this font into the final stages as i get the feeling that it could be adapted to different pieces and made into a more refined typeface. when creating it in final form i do need to retain letter sizing and a more consistent build in order to give it its best effect.

this task allowed me to work freely , under no pressure and really get a feel for type design. this was key as been new to type i needed time to get inspiration and explore possibilities. one thing i would like to do is take my type digital and start to play around with it as a vector image.

Drawing 4 - Inspiring type

Moving on from the object drawing we now started to look into typography workshops. This session involved inspiring ourselves to create different styles of type , eventually leading into creating our own alphabet. The session began by picking different illustrations and photographs to base our type on. The image i picked was an illustration of a man with psychedelic hair. I chose this as i felt there was a lot of potential for development , the hair provided flow and could be morphed into various shapes and forms.

We were given the letters ANESG to work with as they provided variation. i used the strands of hair to build up each letter , i made sure they flowed well and retained the style of the original illustration. I then began to adapt the hair to the illustration and started to use typography as the hair of the figure. I feel that one thing i would improve with this piece is colour , the colour adds to the psychedelic feel of the illustration , providing the vibrant characteristics. My type lacks this but could be easily adjusted. My type feels relatively messy in these stages as typography is a new thing that i have done before and never gone into it with this much detail.

In this stage my typography was only an experiment , i favour sans serif fonts as i feel they look cleaner however in later stages one of the things i hope to explore is serif fonts , mainly because i think they are more skilful to produce.

Typography Seminar

This seminar consisted of each person in the session being given 3 post-it-notes and given the task to design a typeface for the 3 letters we were assigned. I feel that typography is one of my weak points within my studies therefore it would be good to get a different perspective of what everyone else think of it and how they approach the typography task.

The letters i were given were Q R and S , it took me a while to establish an idea for these but eventually i settled on creating the letters out of basic shapes instead of drawing some kind of funky 3D text. i tried my best to make the 3 letters easy to read but detailed in the style they were produced. 

As you can see above my 3 letters flow into each other by one part of the shape being present in the other letters. If i was to improve this design i would make the pieces of each letter slightly bigger as they were quite small and flimsy and took a while to arrange correctly.

After everybody finished their pieces we arranged them into a typography alphabet which displayed the different designs to the rest of the session , i felt that this was useful as i would be able to take inspiration from this.