When it came to designing the remaining letters I found myself producing and developing most of alphabet digitally using Illustrator. Getting the placement correct was an easy enough especially with the straight stemmed letterforms like M and N.
E and F were also delightfully easy to layout thanks to their bars and ended up being my visually favourite letters. In my opinion, the most successful letterforms were the ones where the flow of one character into another appeared seamless- almost like one continuous line (E and Z best represent this).
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| That pesky join |
After creating all the individual glyphs I arranged them in the required 4 x 7 grid- it proved more awkward than I had assumed to align everything by eye due, mainly due to the clunky shapes of individual letters. I had to be shown how to work the alignment tools before I was completely satisfied with the final alphabet.
I was very conscious throughout this project that the manipulations made to the type were incredibly minimal, I was scared that I hadn't done enough. I knew that my concept called for little change to individual letterforms other than positioning and layout but when comparing my work to other's and the extreme manipulations they chose to enact I couldn't help but feel like I'd been too subtle. I know subtlety is something I need to work on- especially knowing when to leave a piece of design alone, but it's still very hard to shut that voice up in your head that says 'Really? You're leaving it like this?'. However that being said, the concept worked very well on the letters Z, E and F to the point where I knew they needed no more work, with these three I was fully confident. On a positive programme note the Illustrator workshops that ran along side of this brief were very useful, I've gone from being afraid of Illustrator to actually wanting to discover more about it and spending time outside of lessons playing about with the software.
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