Alphabet Soup

Alphabet Soup

We began this project by being given a partner. We both sat with each other and followed a quick sheet to answer afew questions to begin to know the person abit better than we already do.

After the initial sheet had been completed i felt i knew abit more about Lisa than i originally did and was then given the chance to find out abit more about what Lisa liked in a more design orientated question.

I began by asking some basic questions like:

• "whats your favorate colour"
• "any inspirational designers"
• "favorite art movement"
• "do you prefer uppercase or lowercase"

And i quickly got an understanding of what Lisa as a design appreciator was about.

Following on from this task we had to decide on a five adjectives to summaries our partners up. as a team we decided upon:

1. Elegant
2. Soft
3. Caring
4. Modern
5. Positive

This kick started the research into a typeface which i would try and adapt to meet something which i felt communicated Lisa as a type. I began by brain storming each word and trying to find some mutual ground of which everything could be then further developed but it wasn't as easy as i would have hoped as the words may sound similar but they all had a very large difference in terms of design.  No matter how far i searched the word Elegant i would always be faced with a scriptive and very curly type which i felt didn't work. I wasn't going out to create a typeface that a young chav could then have tattooed on his wrist, in my opinion the scriptive typeface began to give the design a more young and chavvy feel to it.

I collected some typeface together to analyze trying to link them to my words:

After looking closely at each design i found that the more elegant of the bunch was the Helvetica neue. 

This was due to my interpretation of elegant. Yet i decided to still develop each idea into sheets and have a better look at if my opinion would work as a design:

I experimented with the curves and cursive words aswel as thin typefaces which also inclided the flicks and curles. From the development I went and produced this to a select few classmates in a crit and recied feedback that they all agreed with my idea of elegance being made chavvy bu the flicks and over the top aspects and that for me was enough to go with my plan.

So I decided to steer away from the typical curves and flicks commonly representing elegant and went for a more elegance being the fact that the type is so thin and delicate... The fact that it looks like if you would rush creating the typeface it would break and become useless in my opinion that is more elegant than a giant swirl leaving the ear of a lowercase g. I decided to stick with this being my bases for the type i would create for Lisa and began to work with the rest of the letterforms.

Looking back at my words i noticed caring and soft which made me choose lowercase over uppercase. To turn Helvetica into my own type i used Illustrator and deleted parts of the font to make it look abit more modern and added a tear shape cap on each end of the new strokes i had created these where very smooth and gave a sense of movement to each end of the letter forms the way the stoke would fold back on itself would feel very caring.

This is how my final typeface was presented I feel that laying them out like this almost lost the soft elegance i had tried so hard to capture by spacing them so far apart lost any delicate tracking and kerning used when producing a word. On the other hand i was very happy the legibility of the type created.

This is how i would like to print out the final on A1... I would like to use a light 10% black background and then print the letters in both gold and silver metallic ink to increase the elegance i was previously speaking of.