OUGD403: SB3- Luke-a-Bet

The creation of Luke-a-Bet

My concept for this alphabet was taking a key aspect of Luke's life (Charlton and football), finding the font that suited it (Futura condensed bold) and using his personality to change and adapt it suitably. I had my list of characteristics, now it was just a case of visually representing them. I chose to only adapt the letterforms E, K, L and U throughout my sketching and development stages- I did this to make sure Luke's name  would always look good in his own typeface if it didn't then it couldn't really be a suitable typeface for him.

To get the ball rolling I produced a list of different visual ideas, each one represented some part of his personality: 

a 'sketchy' look to show unfinished, extended descenders for his laziness, squashed 'relaxed' versions of Futura condensed bold for his lazy and chilled out nature and bolder version of the type for his 'bold' personality. When it came to initial sketches it was a case of combining these visual concepts to produce a wide range of design ideas. 

As I began sketching it occurred to me that the letters weren't showing the strength and boldness I had wanted. Luke as a person is a very noticeable individual- the way he stands out from a room or a crowd is the way I needed this type to stand out from the paper. Whilst playing around with how to 'relax' the letters I drew a set with a chunkier bottom that had a greater presence on the page that the others- so I ran with this idea and drew a few letters with the new chunky bottom addition. My other issue was that I found the typeface quite intimidating- after giving the letters presence with it's boldness, I now needed a way to soften it's impact so as to represent Luke's friendly and approachable nature. I found that rounding off the corners gave the letters a softer and more informal feel.

Going through my sketches there were two similar designs that stood out to me as the strongest- the chunky bottomed, relaxed and the sketch version of it. Out of all the designs they were the two that best showed his personality, they included the most characteristics- they didn't just show one side of Luke, they showed lots of different sides of him from his laziness to his friendliness his physical presence and his history. I wrote out Luke in both styles to properly asses how strong they were as designs and to visualise them as the final name badge. I felt both designs were very close to being finished, but it didn't feel like I should have been that close to being finished. 

When it came to the interim crit I looking for confirmation and opinion on which one my favourite designs was strongest as well as suggestions to how I could change them to include more sides of Luke's personality and to 'finish' them off. I presented my two strongest ideas along with my research and ideas in order to give them some context. I also felt it was important to include neater versions of some of my earlier ideas- just incase I'd missed a golden design nugget that would prove stronger than my current idea. 

The crit was useful in some ways and confusing in others. I got the confirmation I was looking for with a couple of people approving of the chunky bottomed design and commenting on it's likeness to Luke, offering suggestions for simple tweaks and subtle changes. The most common suggestion that came up was to find a way to further represent inconsistency and the irregular parts of his character. However a lot of the critique was contradictive; some people liked it some didn't, some felt that the extended descenders worked well, some felt they didn't. Some feedback was entirely useless- people telling me to 'look into football, because he likes football' without seeming to notice that my whole choice of font was based around his love for one specific club. Although for all of it's annoyances and contradictions I came out a lot more confident and certain of my design.


I decided to produce the letterforms at home and then  trace them onto the final poster to save time, however after sketching out all 26 letters and 6 glyphs I discovered they were too big to all fit into the standard size, so I started again. I was still toying with ways to include the inconsistency concept people had mentioned from my crit; it was awkward, I wasn't able to make the changes in the line weights to show inconsistency without loosing the presence on the page. Whilst redrawing out my template letter forms an idea struck me I could represent inconsistency through the size of the glyphs. Reducing the size, having a small exclamation mark next to a large letter didn't cause a loss of impact and added another dimension of 'Lukishness' to the typeface.

Being inconsistent, bold and full of impact I felt that presenting the final typeface in the same way as everyone else wouldn't suit it's character. I needed a form of presentation that complimented the strong presence each letter possessed. Working in the normal 4x7 format to make everything fit I had to scale down the letters quite considerably, although they still had strength to them, it was no where near the block 'most-of-the-page-is-letter' impact I was after. With some minor adjustments to the glyphs, on a 4x8 grid everything fit neatly, the letters got to stay large and the 'slap you in the face' eye-grabbing-ness was restored.  

Name Badge

Final Luke-A-Bet

I wish I had had chance to print my typeface instead of hand rendering it for the final poster. The quality and consistency of black would've been much greater if it had been digitally produced it as well as just looking that but more professional. Looking back on this project I feel I could've done more research - (said in old Chinese voice) Greater knowledge opens up more doors on the road to development. To sum up, as a whole I am thoroughly pleased with my typeface, I'm certain that at some point in the future I'll realise how weak and obvious it is as a piece of design, but right now I would consider it my current favourite piece of work. I feel like I really considered Luke's personality (representing many characteristics instead of just one) as well as his loves and his past, what makes him, him. One person in the final feedback said they loved it as a design, during the interim crit they had felt it was the only typeface where they could tell who it was for, and others agreed. I don't take this as an excuse to not think about or worry about my ideas, or to allow my ego to grow unnecessarily but as proof that I was successful in following the brief and what more could I ask for? 

OUGD403: SB1- Alphabet Soup

Organising words
I had initially sat down feeling confident in my concepts, just itching to translate them to paper, but the physical representation of an idea is a lot harder to visualise than the concept. So I struggled along with my Darwin and bible concepts. I had attempted to transform evenly weighted lines into a tapered ones adding serifs and flourishes- trying to bring the personality of the Origin of Species typeface to helvetica, but it just looked ugly. I tried to add over-the-top stylised gothic details to my uniformed sans serif type but it looked awkward and uncomfortable on the eye. (I ended up receiving a lot of positive feedback on my gothic letters, so they must have had some appeal to them- it's just that I can't find it.)

Gothic A

Gothic H

Tapered S

Even width S

H- the only one serif's worked on

Tapered E

Even width E

The worst casualty of my concepts was an 'evolve' idea, which I had been very passionate about on the first day of our brief. I had wanted to show evolving and gradual change through type. Either by transforming each letter slightly so that the first and last letter were completely different or within each letter itself showing the start and end of their manipulation at the same time (the original outline of helvetica with a darker outline of its transformation over the top.) This was obviously way to complicated to reflect in the subtle style of type and it showed- the sketch just looked a mess. 

Ew...

My research didn't end up being a complete waste of time and I managed to get a couple of visually pleasing designs from it. The first derived from the idea of natural history illustrations- I kept the font as a stroke (mirroring the pen and ink drawing style) and added markers identifying key parts of the anatomy. I especially liked this concept because we had recently learned about type anatomy and I made sure that the markers pointed to the anatomical features of the letter. The second was based on the periodic table of elements- I just 'squished' the two letters together to make it a single letterform instead of two.

Anatomy A

Anatomy H

Periodic Table

So I liked these ideas- but I still needed more. Due to my earlier problem of translating concepts I had abandoned some original ideas and was now in the process of finding their replacements. I went back to the words written about evolve and helvetica and looked over my initial ideas mind map searching for a new concept. I decided on the word dinosaur and specifically the idea of dinosaur bones and fossils and then created two concepts off of this. One- I thought of the physical process of creating fossils (pressure over time) and tried to represent it in my letter forms. I condensed them and squashed them and filled in the counters and bowls (so it would look like oil) and I really loved my result. Personally, this concept was my favourite. Two- I thought again about the process of creating fossils, this time layering and the hidden aspect (hidden because they're underground...) and showed this by drawing a line through the letters filling in one half and leaving the other half as an outline and extending the descenders into the 'ground'- this felt like a clumsier way of representing a similar concept but I'm still uncertain. (I also played around with the ascender length and which half should be coloured but this was just experimentation)

Squashed A

Squashed G

Fossil concept 2

Fossil D

Fossil G2

Fossil D2

The Interim Crit

It was suggested by the group that for my sediments idea that I could look into adding 'layers' to the letterforms either by hand drawing or physically building them. I was definitely pushed towards the idea of creating a 3D letterform and working outside of the medium of pen and ink. One person suggested developing my 'squashed' idea in 3D by building an 'a' and actually squashing it. And for my periodic table idea I was told to play around with the placement of the lowercase next to uppercase. The general feeling was that my periodic table idea was the strongest. 

Developed sentences

Based off of the feedback I received from our first group crit I decided I wanted to explore another mediums and develop a few ideas a little further. I chose my fossil concept with which to do this- it was my favourite and got the most feedback. I felt I needed to work in a medium I hadn't used for a few years, 3D. So I went to the entertainer and bought playdoh pots for 75p per piece (a god damned bargain if you ask me) and began to play around. 

I had wanted to show the 'build up' of layers and sediments within the rock, I felt a stop motion video conveyed this best. 

Following on from my squash concept I had wanted to build the helvetica letters and physically squish them to see how they reacted.

'A' before

'A' after

'G' before

'G' after (and it was very satisfying)

The Final 10

How did I do?

I'm a mixture of pleased and disappointed, considering I've rarely looked at/studied type anatomy and typography I feel like some of the ideas I came up with were really original and pushed me out of my comfort zone. That being said some of them are just awful and completely unimaginative. I suppose I'm not sure what counts as enough when it comes to type manipulation, I certainly want the new letterform to look different from the original but by how much? I always feel like I need to add more and I never know when to let off and not be obvious with my design choice. All the manipulations I did do were rather extreme, I didn't consider the subtler changes I could've made and that's a shame, I could've potentially come out with some nice pieces of work.  

I need to get better at sketching letters, all I'm used to drawing is people and characters, drawing letters and type feels so alien to my hand. I spent a lot of sketch time staring blankly at a piece of paper wondering where the hell to start.