OUGD101. Alphabet Soup Interview

Todays brief started by collecting information about another student through the use of a constructed questionnaire given to us by our course leader.

From the information collected and any additional information we planned on investigating our brief was to design a Handmade type that reflected and communicated that person. This was similar to the summer brief yet instead of making type for myself i had create a type i thought would suit another student. The type had to be the full alphabet and include a series of glyphs.
: . ! ? @ £
It also had to be presented on a sheet of A1 Tracing paper in a 4x8 layout.

From the information gathered and additional questions asked i fount that Kim liked Photography, Clubbing, House music, 'the student life', drinking & socialising, nightlife and the city. I came up with 5 words which i would focus on to develop and design a typeface, these were:

Mischievous,

Fun Loving,

Clubbing,

The City at night,

Stylish.

I started by looking at night time photography to see how artificial lighting played a key role in these images.

I started looking at slow shutterspeeds, club lighting and tube lighting.

I researched club names to see what fonts they used, i found them to be simple fonts, some had been adapted to make them appear more sylish. I started to play around with the idea of light and type using simple fonts.

I like the stylish yet tacky elements of tube lighting, the way in which they flow and link letters and words wish garish colours.

 

I took a few photographs of different lights in clubs and liked how discoballs were used in many clubs to create illuminated patterns over the walls. I like how light reflected off of the mirrored pieces. They are an iconic image to disco's and clubbing.

I started to develop my work further by looking into the idea of the glitterball. Adapting type to take on its appearence.

I decided to stretch the letters so that they fit into the shape of a glitterball using Adobe Illustrator, i tried to make each letter follow a rule. It could only be stretched horizontally and had to touch the outer edges. Some of the glyphs proved tricky and the 'I' appears like an 'o' but looking at the 'o' you can see the counter.

Colour testing was vital as we were drawing our finished type onto tracing paper, i wanted vibrant, neon colours and preferably a metallic finish to resemble the discoball.
I made an A1 layout plan before drawing the final piece as a mistake would mean starting the whole piece again.