Alphabet Soup Part 2 : Typeface

Design a typeface for a full alphabet and glyphs that represents the personality/character of your partner. 

My Partner is Laura Tomlinson.

In order to start this task I had to get to know Laura, I asked her some questions which were given to me as well as some of my own. 

• What is your favourite colour?

Black (likes all colours)

• What is your earliest memory?

Went to the park and fell off the climbing frame and ended up in A+E

• Which living designer do you most admire and why?

Sagmeister - Laura went to an exhibition in Paris and loved the work

• What is your most treasured possession?

Macbook

• What would your super power be?

Teleportation

• What piece of graphic design do you wish you had created?

Curators book for lots of new artists (did not know the name)

• Who would play you in a film of your life?

Zooey Deschanel

• Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?

Alex Turner, Joseph Gordon Levitt and Stephen Hawkin

• What makes you unhappy?

Life

• What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?

CanCan girl

• What words of phrases do you most overuse?

Delicious, wicked

What is your favourite :

• Film

Looper (at the moment)

• Song

Mystery Jets - Someone Purer (at the moment)

• Band

Arctic Monkeys/ The Maccabees

• Food

Harrissa Chicken (Morrocan)

• Shop

Rise (small independent record shop which also sells art books & prints and clothes)

• TV Programme

How I Met Your Mother & Grand Designs

• Animal

Dogs

• Place on earth

Grans house, on top of a hill in the countryside

• Alcoholic Drink

Margarita

• Font

Helvetica (or hand drawn)

• Item of clothing

Ladybird Dress

• Where are you from?

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

• How old are you?

19

• Are you tidy or messy?

Messy (organised mess)

• Do you have any siblings?

Identical twin (called Ellen) and an older sister

• What are your hobbies?

Swimming and going to gigs and festivals

• Do you have a job?

Not at the moment, used to work in Tesco

Development

I printed out the Helvetica alphabet and drew on top of it, I thought this was the most effective way to experiment with ideas.

One of Laura's answers to the questions set by Amber was what would you dress up as, her answer was a CanCan girl. I drew out some basic legs and added them to a type. I like the idea but not for this brief. I also think my software skills are too basic for me to create this style without it looking amateur. 

Another aspect I picked up on was that her favourite food was Moroccan. I researched different patterns and chose 3 of my favourites. I then recreated them on photoshop into one big image which I then masked on photoshop. I like this idea but I think it would work better for another brief.

 After extensive research which I have displayed here I settled on the idea of having gig/concert/festival tickets inside each of my letters. I experimented with this idea above and I think it looks really effective. I really wanted to include more than one aspect of Laura's personality into my typeface so I chose to fill the type inside each letterform with a rough sketchy shading representing her 'organised mess' feature.

As another experiment I added an image of Alex Turner who is the lead singer of Laura's favourite band; The Arctic Monkeys. I traced over his face which I had placed inside a random letterform. I think the idea has more poor qualities than good therefore I have chosen not to use it.

One other worry of mine was that, due to the detail in my letterforms, Helvetica was a bad choice of font. I tried out my idea with Arial Black and found that it works much better. 

As I have never created my own type in this format I have found it very difficult to get the correct spacing between each letterform. Above I have shown one of my problems (W being too big.) After asking some people for a solution to my problem I have considered many things, changing my font back to Helvetica in order to keep my designs on the larger side or simply changing the size of my current typeface.

Final Typeface

I settled on making my typeface smaller which I thought would have a negative effect on the size of each letterform and the detail inside. When I printed my final typeface I found that the letters were significantly bigger than I had expected meaning that the detail inside each was very clear and easy to read/identify. With my idea I had to have an open mind to how it would look when hand drawn, unlike other peoples work my idea would look very different after being traced.

I chose to use the digital versions of my letterforms to create the name badge for Laura.