18 Jan 2010

Type type type

This week in graphics we are doing one day workshops in typography. First day today was all about using shapes to create letters, and how this gives the letters similarities. We were given a sheet of shapes and told to construct a given letter in upper case and lower case, first of all using all of the shapes on the paper. We then put them all up on the wall to make a full typeface:


My H & h in amongst the others:


It was really interesting to see all the letters together, they really worked as a set even though they were all made by different people, all because of the restriction we were given to use every shape.

Next we had to produce our letter, upper case and lower case, only using two shapes. This was a lot harder because although I might recognise my letter in an abstract form, because I know what it is, I have to try and communicate this to the viewer by placing the shapes in the right place. This is all the letters in their group typeface:


The idea is linked to that of Brian Coe, who's Visible Word text from 1963 looked at how much of a letter we need to see to recognise it as that letter.

After the two restricted excercises, we were told to create another letter using however many shapes we wanted, we just had to make them on the baseline etc grid. Obviously when given no restrictions the letters made a much more jumbled typeface that didn't work as well when put all together, even though the letters individually worked really well..



Now our task is to complete our own full typeface using the shapes, setting our own restrictions. I've nearly completed my 26 letters, I'm going to photocopy them and shrink them down a bit so I can see them properly all together and then I'll load them onto here. Tomorrow we are using found objects to create letter forms.

1 comment:

  1. wow jattie howitt. thats quite a letroset youve got goin on

    ReplyDelete