Tree Typography

Today I went to the Design Museum to see the exhibition for the Brit Insurance design awards. There was some amazing stuff, but this was my favourite by faaar, its a 'forest of typography', made by Why Not Associates in collaboration with Crawley Library.

Workshops were set up with library users to find out their favourite pieces of writing, and then the text was sandblasted into oak tree trunks making floor to ceiling pillars.

Each of the 14 trees has a different theme, one even has the opening lines of a Harry Potter book. The work was described as "An elegant reminder of the importance of words, ideas and literacy."

Poster project leaves the studio

I wanted to put my poster in context so I went to my local dairy crest branch and the nice milkman got out a milk float and let me take these photos!

DECODE

Best exhibition i've been to in a LONG time. It was all about new digital technologies providing new tools for artists and designers. Lots of interactive things that I have no idea how they work but they were amazing. As you walk into the exhibition there are plants that light up with you moving along past them..

The image below left is of a screen with an animation made through code that changes in shape, colour and size in response to your voice.. It was a bit weird talking to a screen but it really worked.. And the dandelion was another screen with an interactive animation. You blow the screen with a hair dryer and it scatters the seeds.

This mirror was amazing, when you walked past it nothing happened, but when you stood completely still infront of it, you slowly fade into the screen.

The image above is of my favourite thing in the exhibition, its an interactive board that without touching it, but just standing infront of it, you can draw splashes of colour. Its got a genius title as well, 'Body Paint.'

Below is a piece of work that is a moving diagram of all the flights across North America in 24 hours. All the coloured lines are moving, and they all represent individual flights. It turns what could be a pretty dull mass of information into something really beautiful. I now wish I was a massive computer/technology geek because it would be so good to know how these things all work!

'Voice' poster project

We had to design a poster based around supporting a local cause. My idea was a pretty random one about encouraging people to support their milkman..

I think probably the three words at the bottom need to be bigger, but at the moment i'm going to wait and see what it looks like when my tutor gets it printed A1 in b&w. And i'm thinking about maybe when i've got that large copy taking a photo of it stuck on a milkfloat or outside the Dairy Crest depot down the road.

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.