Typography week comes to an end

The last typography workshop of the week was based around transforming the classic font, Helvetica, in the style of a word that we had to choose from a list. My chosen word was 'Construct.' I was thinking about simply separating the letters out into pieces, but then I had a lightbulb moment and thought jigsaw! We were given the alphabet printed on A4 pages in Helvetica so I cut up all the 26 letters into 144 jigsaw pieces. The A above was my obvious starting point and this is my full alphabet all put together in a big font construction:

This week really has turned me into a typography geek, we even watched the film

and I found it really interesting! On the journey home I was spotting Helevetica everywhere, a very geeky way to pass time on the train but it worked.

And this is my font that I'm working on from the first typography workshop day, it's all made up of the same rectangular and semicircle shapes. Some of them still need sizing up and I need the f's,g's etc to fill the space properly but yeah, this is what it looks like at the moment:

Letterpress

I went to a letterpress workshop today and learnt how to do this traditional printing. It required a lot of patience because it takes f o r e v e r to do but was worth it in the end. This is the block that I made out of the stamps from my chosen font, Perpetua:

And this was my end result:

Now I've had the induction in how to get started with letterpress I want to do more and it should be a lot quicker. I really like the handmade effect that it produces, you can't really see on the photos at all but the finish is just so much nicer than text printed off the computer.

Typeday2

Today was based around this image below, Paul Elliman's found font. Which is pretty obviously, font made from found objects.

I used my 3D glasses I got when I went to see Avatar and a couple of pencils to create mine. I placed my objects on an OHP, these are photos of the images it produced projected on a wall:

I then traced the letters off the wall, traced that again in black pen, photocopied it, filled it in with black pen, photocopied it again, cut it out and arranged it in order and photocopied it again shrinking it down a bit... to make this!

I want to now scan the individual letters into the computer and sort out the sizing. If I want this to become a typeface the letters need to be the same height. I'm pleased with this so far though, I like how you can see with every letter how it is made up of the glasses. I think I'm only going to complete it up to the letter 'h' though at the moment because I'm still working on sorting out my 26 letter shapes-typeface from yesterdays workshop, which I'll get done tomorrow!

Busy times.

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.

The snow

won't go away, i'm not happy.
my brothers made a pretty impressive igloo today though,

"for years to come it will define what movies can achieve"

Pretty much the most epic film of all epic-ness. Saw it today in 3D, (the glasses you get are COOL) the effects are ridiculously good and it sort of made me wish I was blue.

Christopher Bailey is a genius

Procrastinating by flicking through style.com, I've decided he really is very clever. He manages to make a traditional trench coat amazing every season, and of course design some beautiful clothes at the same time. My favourites from the Burberry Prorsum Spring 2010 Ready-To-Wear collection..

I bought myself a beige trench from Gap a couple of months ago. It will have to do for now.. maybe in a (good few) years I'll be able to upgrade it to a Burberry one..

Snow Day

Phenomena

I've just been set a new project brief titled 'How Things Work,' that follows on from research I did in the christmas holidays about my chosen phenomena, Photosynthesis. When I was doing the research I got out my old GCSE biology textbooks and reminded myself what photosynthesis actually is, and then I experimented with ways of presenting this information. I wanted to see how I could use the word equation (Carbon Dioxide + Water + Light --> Glucose + Oxygen) and also how I could just show the facts that I found out about.

A couple of the Ideas I experimented with..

And i got my typewriter to work!

So the new brief is all about taking these ideas and the research forward and making a one minute film explaining the phenomena and how it works. I've got to work out how I'm going to simply explain photosynthesis... I know I want my film to be made in stop frame animation style, but I need to story board the information that I want to include and make sure its not dull and doesn't overload the viewer with facts. Should be interesting..

Number One

I've decided to set up a blog to use as an online sketchbook, putting up things I'm working on and other things I just like, so I can have them all together in one place.
So yeah I'm just going to try it out and see how it goes..