Design Practice

We where given a new brief to create a submission for the new " Letter, Word, Sentence, Paragraph " competition. The work produced, if chosen would be show cased in the new book which was being released. This is a great opportunity to try get some of your work out there and seen in the public.

I started out thinking about what i could do.. We where told it had to be type based and follow the word " Opposites".

I started to think about how i could approach this and remembered back to my brief on typographic terms we did earlier in the year and tried to give the type a sort of constructed approach, the problem being that i had returned tot hat project for inspiration once already and didn't want it to look as though i was a one trick pony so i decided to sketch up some ideas on how to show opposites...

[ insert images ]

looking at the above it shows how the ideas could go i didn't really come up with a definite answer to what id like to focus on... the ones which felt right to me where:

• Rich & Poor
• Paid for typefaces vs Free
• Serif & Sans Serif
• A nice way of showing the difference
• Fancy & Simple
• Script Vs Sans Serif
• Windows & Macintosh
• OS specific typefaces, perhaps abit hard and abit too nerdy to apple.

The above i feel would make a nice poster set regardless of choice but i think i will be going with the:

Serif & Sans Serif

this is because its something i love about type and i feel a outcome worthy of a book that is souly based around the type factor.

I thought a series of posters which best show "opposite" would be the easiest way to get the point of sans serif and serif across. Looking into it i decided to focus on how the opposite could also be known as a mirrored image, the wrong, the way left is right in a mirror and right is left.... Then it came to me, lets make the sans serif fonts, serif... and vice versa. A fun cheeky way of showing the opposite without making it mega obvious.

So hell, lets look Helvetica, possibly the biggest known sans serif font going, noticeable of its square full stop and used in many many things. People who are in the know seem to always know when your using helvetica so lets see how they play if we add the serifs onto the typeface... fun, no?

[ insert development ]

So after working out how to add them to the objects i have created afew alternatives of the design i was looking at using.

some of these i felt looked too comical and lost seriousness. 

I ended up showing these to class mates and explaining how they should be looked at and then re looked at as they notice something is wrong. By showing the serif version of helvetica in blue and the right way it drags your eye to it and the correct way being spelt in reflect underneath adds a sense of interaction with the item, in this case a book could be turned upside down or looked at in the mirror !

this would be the finals

I was really happy with this outcome and felt it was both interactive and still very type orientated.
Showing this in the final crit left me feeling quite deflated as many class mates produced items which looked busier than mine and i feel the way i spoke about my work maybe had people thinking i didn't put as much effort into this piece as i did. I didn't feel good about it and just left it in my plan chest and considered it a failure and looked forward to the next brief... in doing so i missed the hand in deadline which at the time i didnt consider a problem as i didn't feel it met the brief at all and would have saved some time in the viewing process. But then found out it could go against my mark for this module... which isn't great.

Conclusion.
A very fun way to show a live brief, it was short and powerful with imaginative ideas and a sense of freedom to do as we wished. I learnt that less can be more and more can sometimes just look cluttered and not make sense. If i could re visit this brief again i would probably only change the request to hand the item into the competition regardless if i felt it didn't work or would be useful.