Alphabet soup pt.2 - Jonny's Font.

For this 2 week brief, we each had to create a typeface which reflects our partners personality. My partner was Jonny.

The words I had which described Jonny were confident, funny, opinionated, artistic, organised, temperamental, chatty, contemplative, indifferent and amusing. I realised I couldn't include all these characteristics as some condradict others, so I put them into groups of which I felt fit together.

Artistic was the easy one, it could be pretty much anything, but I came up with a paint brush and the marks which it makes. For example...

I wanted this to be the fill for my letters but as our final a1 piece had to be traced, I realised this would prove a lot harder that I thought, so I decided not to take it any further. Though I will experiment with this technique when we digitalise our work.

I was struggling to come up with ideas so I looked in the thesaurous for words which related to the words i'd got. This would also give me an in depth understanding of the words. For indifferent I got unconcearned, casual, relaxed, laid back and easy going. When thinking of relaxed/laid back as a typeface I thought of itallics, so I began experimanting with the angles of the letters. As a result of this I ended up making only half the letters itallic to create the idea of the letters literally being layed back. Instead of the itallics leaning to the right I lent them to the left to emphasise them being layed back. It's really subtle yet I feel it's really effective.

One of the words I found for organise was frame, so I used just the outline to frame the letters. I am a little unsure of how frame can represent organise though. I also used capitals to show maturity and confidence.

Here's my final outcome...

I am pleased with the outcome, though I feel it would of worked a lot better if the outline was thicker. This way I could of shown confidence more effectively. I also feel I should look more into the angles of the letters as some aren't as successful as others. This was the major problem when creating these letters but I thought the best way was to keep every angle the same no matter what the current angle was. I think I overcome this problem quite well I just feel I need to look more at the O and Q, and possibly the X, which will be a lot easier to do on illustrator.

I felt my typeface worked particually well on the name badge. This proves that the typeface is practical/functional as well as aesthetic.

As for my partners typeface, I feel he put across my personality really well. I especially liked the dashed/incomplete lines to show that i'm shy. Jo made the point of saying I was being a bit too generous when it came to the crit, but I actually really liked it.

The only issue I had was that it didn't work as particually well on the a1 sheet as he seperated the letters. Whereas on the name badge he joined the letters and where they crossed/overlapped was the confident part of my personality showing through.

I really can't wait to get all my letters onto illustrator. I will put them up as soon as they're done. =)