HOW WOULD IT WORK AS A FONT

Here are some tryouts, I want to keep the black background, to sort of have grid like square for each letterform. Gives a different kind of effect, although this kind of font would be quite linear and 'stiff', in the sense I can't see it working as an italic, or bold typeface. Unless the actual letters getting built are italic/bold/light/ultrabold etc? That's something to think about.

Here are a few, where I experimented with the tracking between each letter.

ACTION SHOTS + FINAL PRINT (AGAIN)

Overall, I'm quite happy with the final print. I think the black background works well against the yellow. Black and Yellow are two colours that are well known to contrast and work with each other nicely without being too horrible on the ol' eyes. I was a abit worried about whether the intricacy of it would be troublesome for the printer but it was more than up to it. Some of it is quite intricate, with a 0.5pt stroke on the crane detail etc but I guess blowing it up to A1 size eradicated that problem and on the whole I think it went well and it's abit different to what you'd normally expect I guess.

Its's white A1 cartridge stock with 100% black (K) and 100% Yellow (Y) print. Obviously the white parts of the print, are areas where no ink is involved because of the white stock.

Next thing to do is test out the typeface and see how it could possibly work as a font.

SETTING UP THE GRID FOR PRINT (AGAIN!)

Here are some screenshots that hopefully give an idea of how I lined up the letterforms correctly and how I used the guides to make a sort of grid that I worked to, to make sure everything was in line and exactly how it needed to be.

Here is a screenshot of me laying out the letterforms on the grid in Illustrator. I'm literally using the guides as a grid (something I learnt in the Illustrator workshops!). They're so useful and make life so much easier, essential bit of tech. You can see here, they're all lined up horizontally and vertically so the baselines are all perfectly in line. They all have a sort of gutter in between to give them abit of space to breathe. The gutter is the same size horizontally and vertically between them.

Here's me lining up the 'P', you can see that it's slightly not in line with the grids, I find the bounding box very useful for aligning them because it basically shows you the vertical and horizontal edges, so if I line up the bounding box with my guides - I can't really go wrong hopefully.

Here it is after it's lined up, as you can see the bottom base of the crane is just snug against the vertical guide and the top point of the crane is snug against the horizontal guide. I basically did this with all the letterforms until I ended up with this...

Now all that needs adding is the glyphs. Here it is with the guides

Without guides gives a better clue of how it will look.

I'm not happy with the gutter gaps in between them. I want it to nicely fill up all the page to give each letterform it's own sort of space. So I increased the gaps like so..

I highlighted the shown amount, nudged them to the right. I kept hold of SHIFT while doing so, so it moved it in equal increments everytime I pressed right on the keyboard. I did this for each column one by one, working from the left so I ended up with..

This. Which I'm quite happy with.

I'm now ready to print.

SCHOOLBOY ERROR!

My typeface poster is white stock with Black and Red ink on it. I realised Red, isn't CMYK and isn't a pure colour plate, unless you're working with RGB obviously. The brief says...

"Produce an alphabet based on one of the letterforms you created from the Alphabet Soup, Visual Thinking brief. You are restricted to using black and one colour and it is to be produced in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, key). Although you are restricted to one colour you experiment with opacity and half tones."

So obviously, my poster isn't true to the brief. Red isn't a colour from CMYK, it's a mixture of more than one colour. So I need to go back to it and change up the colour. I quite fancy yellow, as it's a work in progress, building site, high visibility kinda colour. 

Bit concerned about the visibility of the yellow crane. Yellow is purposefully the colour of building site tools because of the visibility, against white it kind of defeats the point. So I tried it against a black background and made the harness mechanism and letter white, so obviously it contrasts and doesn't blend against the background.

Prefer it with a black background.  I think this will be the actual letterform itself, a black sort of grid like square with a pictogram inside it.

I'll now start laying this out into the A1 grid.

LAYOUT IDEAS FOR A1 PRINT SHEET

I have 26 letterforms and 6 glyphs, which equates to 32 characters. So what makes sense to me is 8x4=32... 8 rows of 4 characters. Although that's quite linear and straightforward so I experimented a bit with the layouts but in the end I stuck with a 4x8 grid, but increased the spacing a bit so they all have a bit more room to breathe and there isn't a sort of border around the grid.

*This is the layout I went ahead with for print. 8 rows of 4 letterforms = 32. Bit more room to breathe and fills the paper up nicely.

On this one I essentially had 5x6 =30. 6 rows of 5, with the remaining 2 letterforms sort of tacked onto the top and bottom. In this case the A and the comma glyph. I think it's an interesting variation but something about it just doesn't look right. It's quite a snazzy layout, but that goes against it, it doesn't suit the work in progress kind of aesthetic of the letterforms.

ACTION SHOTS!

Here are a few snaps of the printing process, printed on white A1 cartridge paper stock. I chose the basic 4x8 layout with a bit of room for the letterforms to breath rather than the other variations I've shown in a post.

ILLUSTRATOR BRIEF - CRANE LETTERFORMS DONE

So, I've finished the initial designs for the crane letterforms. There were a few ones where I had to think about it abit as they had floating bits of anatomy and had parts below the baseline etc, such as the comma. Here's some screenshots showing the progress made. Next step is to line it up as a grid on an A1 document and see how they look together, ready for print.

HOW DO I CHOP UP THE LETTERS?

Hopefully the images illustrate it, but basically I converted the type into outlines by clicking on Type>Create Outline in Illustrator. I then drew a shape over the bits I wanted to 'hide' or 'delete', I have 2 copies of the same letter form, for the 2 pieces my crane will be building with.

After placing the shapes on top, open up the pathfinder tool and click on 'minus front' and it deletes the shape from the bottom layer, giving me the exact effect I want.

Here are the shapes after I created an outline, and effectively made them into a shape as if it was drawn by the pen tool

'minus front' is the 2nd button from the left, below where it says Shape Modes. The effect it gives is this...

Did the same for the other O and then placed them where they should be, like so...

Finished product!

ILLUSTRATOR BRIEF - 'BUILD' - CRANE IDEA

I've started to carry on developing the crane idea, I'm going to lay them out in a grid similar to the one for the scaffolding idea in the post below but I thought it'd be easier to work on them individually before importing them all onto the A1 grid.

Some letters can be quite straightforward, but I'm having a bit of fun with choosing what bits are 'built' and what need 'building' all while centering them on the same spot, so they're all standardised and the letters aren't in different spots in relation to the crane. It's produced some quite interesting letterforms where you can tell what the letterform is in a weird way, without it actually being that blatant. I quite like the J and the K for that reason..

Quite happy with this approach actually, I think it's more successful and abit more unique than what you'd expect for something like this.

I actually want the letters to be structurally sound, or at least look it. Don't want any floating bits, like the  tittle of an 'i'. It would kind of defeat the purpose so it'll be interesting to see the solutions to some of the more fiddly letters in the alphabet, and fullstops and commas and that.

At the moment this is just one colour, adding colour to it, it makes sense to either colour the crane or colour the letter that's being 'built'

Here's some quick examples. I'll look into existing cranes and the colours they tend to come in. Initially I like the idea of a bright red or yellow, as they have that work in progress, building sight, high visibility kind of colour. Although the stock will be white - so using yellow might be a bit dodgy in terms of readability and legibility.

CMYK RED + CMYK BLACK

(100%R  + 100%K)

ILLUSTRATOR BRIEF - 'BUILD'

Recently I started to crack on with the illustrator brief which is basically to illustrate a full typeface on an A1 piece of paper, including 6 glyphs. Pretty similar and linked with the alphabet soup stuff I did a typeface about Steph for.

We needed to choose one of the styles we did for the set of letterforms on the theme of 'build'. The final two that I thought would be quite different were these two:

1.

This letterform was based on the idea of "Rome wasn't built in a day", I think it looks quite smart, although the subtlety and lack of a blatant theme of 'build' might play against it. It also looks very similar to existing roman typefaces.

2.

I like this idea, it clearly shows the idea of building. The letterform is being built. it would be more of a symbolic and pictogram style typeface though, such as Wingdings and all that. Maybe research in this area is needed. I don't want it to look too simplistic though, but maybe the way in which I 'build' the letters could become quite interesting.

3.

I think this is the most impressive looking, but I was abit concerned about the amount of time it takes to draw the scaffolding, I didn't know if it was really worth the time. I didn't think it was THAT good that it warrants me spending a fair bit of time drawing up the scaffolding on each letter. Although, it may be worth the effort so I gave it a shot.

I decided to develop 2 and 3. I first developed number 3. Again, the basis of the letterforms was uppercase Helvetica Bold. 

Here is the A1 set up with 6 glyphs etc, with the Helvetica bold typeface layered behind it as a guide.

I found it pretty time consuming and don't really think it was worth the effort, it's gonna end up looking pretty standard and not very out of the ordinary compared to other peoples work that are also doing the same brief.

Here are some close ups: 

I've put this on the shelf for now and I'll carry on developing the crane idea (2). I think it'll be less time consuming and maybe more effective and interesting to look at.

The two colours used on this are K(kblack) and a grey (78% K). So it's actually just one colour with different hue!(?) I think it's hue anyway, more research into Fred's colour theory stuff is probably needed.

ALPHABET SOUP - ILLUSTRATOR WORKSHOP

Last Thursday we had the Illustrator workshop with Simon, it was actually very very useful. I'd used Illustrator quite frequently, even before the workshop but I had never really been taught it, I'd just sort of taught myself and it showed because I realised I was basically making things harder for myself! I'm already using the tools and tips we learned regularly towards other modules and projects. For this Thursday we needed to digitise the 10 letterforms from the Visual Thinking brief. Looking forward to this week session it'll be very useful.