Notes
I find myself being stuck a few times during the course. This is one of those occasions. I think I tend to hit a wall when the brief instructs you on what to do. Do I break this and go off on my own creative journey or stick to what is asked of me?
It began with following the steps in the brief. Feeling quite motivated for this exercise as I seem to have a love for drawing words, more so digitally. I wrote the letters in simple writing then did my own interpretation of the words. It was a safe start but a good warm up nonetheless.
I felt inspired after this, which lead to browsing Pinterest at typography that may match the words.
Fat / Thin
Fun / Boring
Calm / Mad
Fast / Slow
Naturally, during the first stage, I found myself being drawn to particular words that felt like I could really exaggerate and have fun with. The words that interested me most were; Fat, Fun, Slow and Mad (I liked the idea of doing a mixed media mess for Mad). So I turned to the sketchbook and drew what I thought worked with some of the words.
I really wanted to take advantage in this unit with trying different ways of getting paint down. I recycled some packaging bits and pieces, or should I say hoarded, which I found to be useful here. Above, under "Fun" I tried bubble wrap to give the circle effect. The colourful marks represent fun, whilst the sold black line represents boring. A sponge from another packaging was used below to create letters.
Below I took a scrap piece of card and shredded the ends with a knife, I then used this as a paintbrush to get this scratchy effect.
The next step asked you to turn to your computer and use fonts that already existed. So far this was ok, I can see how it is important to understand the powers of a font and how using them in certain ways can conjure up emotion or feeling. The use of an appropriate font can communicate more to you than what is being said, it's art in itself! I browsed what was available on Adobe, and also had a browse on my favourite font website, DAFONT.com - I quickly found a range I was happy with.
I looked at Uppercase and Lowercase, sans and sans-serif. I think the selection below gave good variety on the type of fonts available, and I'm confident they work well with the words. One font I altered to create the desired effect was "Slow". The word felt similar to calm in the sense I could have done another calligraphy font that seems to be one long line that is slowly drawn, but then I didn't feel I would have explored other styles enough. there is something about seeing graphic design with this style typography that I find attractive. I like the way it seems to move when you scroll down, particularly on the phone. So to get this effect I chose a tall font, stretched it a little to make longer, then put the font through "Envelope Distort" > "Make with Warp" > "Wave". I still needed to make a few adjustments after this but the result I think is how I had hoped.
Since being in the lockdown I did unfortunately lack a printer. So the next part of the brief I did find a challenge, however I decided to improvise and carried the process on using Illustrator. With the above fonts, I tried to find imagery that I felt matched and then filled in the fonts using what I find - which I hope I understood was the idea in the brief.
Fat is still my favourite word in this selection, and I love the way the Sumo's are cropped in the lettering below. It might be that to hand draw this word out again I would use Sumo's to make the shapes of the letters. Would be interesting to see how that would work!
Seeing the words with images inside is an interesting way to think beyond a typical square, rectangle or circle crop. This was an enjoyable process to see which fonts worked best when placing imagery inside. Of course words like Thin seemed tricky to fill, however an illustrated representation of the word would be much easier, like the use of bones in my sketchbook for example, and small being represented with the animals to compare the scale of each.
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