Wednesday, 16 October 2013

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. 


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