Summer Brief 2014

For our Summer Brief we were asked to design a typeface of 26 letters that represented our personality. We were given prompt questions such as "What do you love?", "What inspires you?" to help us along. I took these two questions in particular along with another which was "What are your hobbies?" to form the basis of my personality.

I started out by designing a typeface to use within my 26 letters, I experimented with a different types such as serifs, sans serifs and script fonts. Overall I preferred the script fonts as I believed that it represented my arty and creative personality more than sans serif or serif fonts ever could. 

I started to develop a cursive font by experimenting with contrasts in thickness of lines and the lean of the type. After searching for some inspiration within traditional calligraphy I came upon "modern calligraphy" which is a much more relaxed and free flowing type of calligraphy. I thought this suited my personality brilliantly as I love the countryside which is exactly how I just described modern calligraphy - relaxed and free flowing. One particular calligrapher that I loved was Kate Forrester, her style is quirky yet still retains the precision needed for calligraphy.

And so I began with trying my own hand at calligraphy with a dip pen. At first I struggled getting to terms with the concept of down strokes being bold and up strokes being slight, and I often got no difference in the down and upward strokes weight. Eventually I got the hang of it and came up with this type:

As you can see I wanted to vary the way that each letter sat on the base line giving it a more handwritten feel as well as a link to my personality - that I can be clumsy! I layed out the alphabet and scanned it in. Using http://www.myscriptfont.com/ I managed to make it into an actual typeface. Although some of the detail was lost as the thinner lines weren't picked up.

Once I had scanned in my type and live traced it on illustrator I decided to add more of my personality to it by using all the things that inspired me and that I loved from the questions and add a frame of an image behind my text. Below are some examples: