Visual language

In our second lesson we looked at the definitions of verbs, adjectives, nouns, pronoun, subjective personal pronoun and adverbs. This was done so we could understand how it fits to sentence and which does what.

Verb : Doing word

Adjective : Describing word

Noun : Person, place, thing, name, animal, object

Pronoun : Name to a noun

Subjective personal pronoun: she lay still. He, she, his, her, it.

Adverb: Adjective and verb together: eg: running fast

We were then given an article in which we had to minimise the character length to just 140. This included spaces and punctuation so you had to be very finicky about how you worded sentences, but to still make sense.

This was the article:

As a group we managed to summarise it as: "Xfactor Katie Waissel reads everything about herself and tries to make amends regarding Matt Cardles sex scandle. Judges deny such rumours."

Alphabet soup. Take Two!

Ok, so we've had an extended deadline. Basically what we gained from the crit, we were to take into the design process to try and complete our typefaces. Based On what I was told, Heres the plan:

• To find a serif typeface in order to depict where the serifs are.
• For each serif ( in order to give logic to my curls) I will be designing a certain curl for each type to make it consistant throughout my designs.
• I am going to produce my typeface in lower case to make it more legible.
• I am going to keep the logistics of keeping to using 10 shapes to the entire typeface.
• I am going to produce my Typeface digitally - a more proffesional outcome.

Glyphic neue Narrow Italic - This is the font I chose to adapt, now in lowercase.

Times new roman - I had to firstly find a font with many serifs to find where they were within certain letters. I would only be using the lower case element of this font. With this I had to identify the amount of different serifs. I depicted 4 main serifs, which consisted of an ascender serif, spur serif, bracket serif and decender serif. For each of these I produced a design, which you can see below in the design sheet (top right hand corner). This meant that letters would contain just a few 'curls' meaning my design would become more legible, and not too overworked which I felt was an issue in my previous designs.

Heres my first design sheet for the lower case design I intended to do after attending a crit and gaining feedback on my typeface.

 Heres the final product - The entire alphabet and 6 glyphs done in lowercase, using the logic given to my curls, limited shapes and serifs. Overall I really like this design in comparison to my previous uppercase designs. I feel its more simple making more legible, and with lowercase I could build on my adjective 'restricted' as only 5 shapes needed to be used to make the typeface.

Final Designs - Alphabet soup - typeface design

Here are my final typeface design! Finally. 

One of our deliverables was to create a name badge for the person we were basing our type design on. This wasn't as restricted in relation to use of colour. But i decided to stick to the monochrome colour palette as it suited her personality trait of: Restricted.

This is the original font I worked with 'Braggadocio'

Here I began to create my typeface , using a series of only 8 shapes I was able to identify within my designs. The use of glyphs added just 2 more shapes to the collection.

Images of my final tracing onto A1 - Nightmare!

Just a few of my design sheets which led up to my creation.

Finalising designs!

The shapes my entire typeface is made up of

Alphabet soup - The brief and The design process

Brief: Design a typeface for a full alphabet and glyphs that represents the personality of your partner. You will discover their personality through a series of set questions.

Mandatory requirements: The typeface you create must be based on an existing typeface that you will manipulate.

Deliverables: A1 poster - tracing paper. Name badge for your partner - 45mm x 90mm

Week 1, the development stage:

Adjectives: Restrcited, Adventurous, Bold, Constructed and Responsible.

I found it very hard to interpret what the brief meant when defining the need to use an existing typeface. I felt it was very restricting in that you could only manipulate the shape and stem, bowls etc. So I first began with that, just to start on something! Using times new roman and reforming the thickness of serifs and stems. From this I went on to use the form of the uppercase of thsi font, and create a 'futuristic' style of fonts. Restricted was an adjective i used to describe my partner, so i decided to restrict the parts which make up the letter to as little as possible. For instance, within my design sheets you can see an 'M' is made up f just 3 shapes, other letters, even less. I then felt, i was creating my own typeface, but it wasn't related to times new roman, which was against the brief. So i had to take a step back and find a new font i wanted to relate to and manipulate.

I was looking within the book 'Hand Job' by Michael Perry and found an image which used a typeface I really liked. This image can be found with my Design context blog.

Once i understood that i could manipulate the font in a more creative way i decided, in relation to my adjectives, that an 'art deco floral pattern' approach would be suitable. I did many experiments but then realised I was being too loose in my designing structuring. There needed to be a simularity between the letterforms, for instance, several of my designs have the same stem, all of which could be one design and duplicated between each letter. But so far, i had overlooked this prospect...

So to gain some logic to my typeface, I decided to try and categorize the shapes which make up my typeface. Here's just a start. I intend to go more in depth, but you shall just have to wait for that!