For this brief we were asked to create an alphabet based on one of the designs from the first Alphabet Soup brief. We were told to develop our letterforms further utilising Adobe Illustrator to produce our outcomes.
I started by looking at my original letterforms and trying to pick out one that would be feasible to base a whole typeface on and one that would look effective. The 3 letterforms that I liked the most were the 'e' the 't' and the 'm.' I decided that the 'm' would probably be the best to design a whole typeface on. At this point I wanted to design type that was readable and subtle and could possibly be used as body copy. I thought that basing my design on this 'm' I may produce a unique condensed typeface.
I started developing it by doing some quick sketches of what I wanted some of the letterforms to look like. This was important as there were some letters that were difficult to manipulate in this way and it made me think in more depth about how I was going to go about it and overcome problems that I came across.
I started developing the type using the divided tool on the pathfinder menu. I used a grid to ensure that the letters were uniform. I started developing both upper case and lower case as the last typeface we designed I only produced lower case and I felt that the type seemed to be missing something. It also made it difficult to actually use practically.
After producing a few of the letters I decided that I didn't like the type. It was a purely aesthetic decision, I felt that the letterforms still communicated the concept of closeness and confinement. I decided there was no point pushing forward with they type if it wasn't working aesthetically.
I decided that I may be able to do something more interesting if I based the type on a different original letterform. I decided to abandon the idea of making type that would be suitable for body copy. After reading the brief again I decided that I wanted to experiment with opacity. This would probably restrict the letters to being used for titles and headers only but I was happy to go down that route.
I really liked the shadows that were produced by the letter 't' that I created and decided that I wanted to look further into using these shadows. I wanted to make them cleaner and the availability of Illustrator allowed this. I did a couple of quick sketches just to see if it would work effectively but I didn't spend long sketching as I knew that the outcomes would be produced much faster if I used Illustrator.
I experimented with quite extreme manipulations as I wasn't worrying about making this readable for body copy. I decided that some problems may arise when trying to write out words with type like this so decided to experiment with making them subtler. I used the colour palette and used an 80% opacity of black and a 50% opacity along with 100% . I felt the different shades gave the impression of shadows being cast from multiple light sources.
The manipulations I decided on in the end were really subtle. I felt that this would make the type more usable. I also felt that it fitted the concept of closeness better. I wanted the letters to look raised from the paper but only slightly to put across the closeness concept and using shadows that were really offset doesn't give off this impression. The subtlety actually makes the letters look as if they are hovering slightly. I decided that I wanted something more to this project, both to make it more visually interesting and to communicate the concept of closeness further. I experimented with using the condensed type I had started making and combining this with the shadows idea.
I didn't like the outcome of this experiment. I decided that it was too messy and didn't work before I had even applied the colours. I did like the idea of the letterform being split into two and the two parts being close to one another though.
I decided that using a diagonal line to divide the letters and moving the two halves away from one another rather than together would work better than moving the letters together. There would still be a small gap and this would communicate the closeness concept but it wouldn't make the letters look squashed and messy.
I was really happy with the outcome of this experiment and decided i wanted to use this. I applied it to all of my letterforms to produce the final alphabet.
Overall I was happy with the outcome of my typeface for this brief. I felt it was aesthetically pleasing and communicated the concept well. Despite not liking the word I was originally given to base this type on (domestic) I am happy with how it has turned out.
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