It was my last Process and Production workshop today, and I was back with John, once again, editing and developing my personalised font. In the first of the three sessions, I created two bold fonts that I wass really fond of, with inspiration from given existing art work. I decided to take ahead, the font that presented sharp, bold letters. I preferred a thicker, more detailed font as apposed to the design I created with the red triangles. I have shown my starting point below, and the design work I produced in my second session, involving a full, quickly sketched alphabet.
I came to this workshop, understanding and excited for the next stage. I was refining my fully sketched out alphabet, creating a full set of matching letter forms. As you can see from the alphabet above, the letters have a lot of detailed edges, some more than others - this was the main focal point that I needed to refine, making sure they all had a similar amount of cut out edges and tidying up the look of them all together. I had to draft each letter a number of times, to help me figure out which line arrangement would work the best. Some letters I really struggled with, such as 'R' and 'V'. Letters with diagonal lines were quite hard to piece together; I had to make sure they were legible, and the right shape was being arranged, including all the diagonals, as well as cut out square edges. It took me all session to draft each letter and decide on which I was taking ahead. Eventually I pieced my alphabet together on graph paper - this was the easiest paper to use because of the existing squares. I decided on using four full squares for the heigh of each letter, and three for the length. Inside these measurements, I could use the lines that also included smaller squares, creating the squared look very easily. Below I have shown my draft work that lead me to creating my final drawn outcome.
My refinement was now complete, and all I had to do was piece my alphabet together. Below is my personalised typography. I believe that my work has been refined very well, the sides of each letter work well against the others, and each letter is clear (although the shapes are distorted). My edges are tidy, and my letters are all the same size, using capitalised letters to create more cut out edges (due to the capitals taking up all four squares in length rather than just halves). The next stage for me was to create the font digitally. I did this in my own time at home after university, using InDesign and the pen tool. I created a guide that gave me equal sided squares, enough for me to use instead of graph paper. I then copied my font and filled the letters in.
The only letter I was told to possibly adjust was the 'V'. I agree that it didn't really match the rest of the letters, so when designing it digitally, I added a cut out on the diagonal line, making sure it was the same size as all my other cut out edges. Now I have a full, digitally produced font that I am extremely happy with.
