Typefaces and Fonts - Design Principles

Following on from this session and in preparation for Tuesdays session, I developed the letter X into Bold, Light and Italic in both upper and lower case to show how they would work as a typeface at this preliminary stage.

Alphabet Soup - Typeface

Continuing from yesterday I experimented with different flicks on the end of each letter. By "the end of each letter" I mean where your pen would be after finishing writing the letter. When I was happy with each flick I filled the flick and letter in with black pen.

The Letters Filled In After I'd Drawn Flicks

I then scanned the 4 pages and placed each letter in a simple grid system showing the position they'll be in on the A2 sheet when I trace them. I also added lines on the baselines and vertical guides so I can line up and stick the sheets together when it comes to tracing the letters.

Letters Positioned On The Baseline With The Centre Of Each
Letter Being Placed Either 25% Or 75% Along The Horizontal

Typefaces and Fonts - Design Principles

Todays afternoon session was about learning the differences between a Font and a Typeface, two things which until now I wasn't able to distinguish between. I now know that a Typeface contains many fonts, whereas a font is the lettering in one particular style. For example, Arial Bold at 12pt is one font, but Arial Bold at 24pt is another font. The Arial typeface on the other hand includes Arial, Arial Narrow, Arial Bold etc etc, all in all pt sizes.

We had previously been asked to choose a font that best describes the 6 production methods we'd looked at last week, and print out the letters A, B, C, X, Y and Z both upper case and lower case in each font. The fonts I chose were:

Stone: Times New Roman
Sable: Lucinda Blackletter
Bone: Zipfino
Wood: Gill Sans Ultra Bold
Metal: Geneva
Silicon: Cooper Black

We were today asked to develop the capital letters of one of the 6 fonts in a consistent style in order to create our own font. I chose to develop Geneva because it was the plainest font and so had the greatest room for development. We were then told that over the coming weeks we would be developing this font into a typeface.

My Font

Alphabet Soup - Typeface

After responding to the feedback from the crit, I decided that I'd concentrate soley on developing stone sans, and the first thing to do in relation to the feedback was make the font thinner. I did this by adding a white stroke to the letters, which I'd set out in appropriate sizes for when they'd be printed out.

Showing How I Set Up The Pages And Added Strokes To The Letters To Thin The Inside

I then printed these letters out and traced them in pencil, allowing me to easier refine the shape of some of the letters, as adding the stroke had lost some of the detail in certain letters, an example of this is where the bowl joined the stem in the a, b, d, p and q, the joint wasn't pointed and instead had a horizontal line joining the two features.

My Drawn Outlines Of The Letters

I then scanned in these outlines so I could distort them in Photoshop by skewing them, in order to give them a more italic feel. The reason I'm doing this now rather than using Italic as part of the original font was because sometimes an italic font and a standard font vary in the shape of some of the letterforms, and by making it italic manually allowed me to keep the shape of the letters.

Skewing The Letters In Photoshop For A More Italic Look

From here on I will look at experimenting with different positions and styles of serifs, as well as experimenting with adding a little flick at the end of each letter like I spoke about in this post, something I haven't yet looked at doing.

Fanta Can

This is interesting to me from a typographic point of view because of how the text is on a curved surface rather than a flat one, and I think this, along with the fun nature of the fanta brand, has influenced the curved and soft style of text used. I also think it's interesting how a thick stroke has been used, which is unusual in big companies, but in this case it's probably necessary as the contrast between the metallic blue and the orange might be too strong. 

Alphabet Soup - Typeface - Development

Today I merged the two fonts I chose to represent Sophie together by tracing the serifs on Cantoria on Illustrator and adding the serif shapes to Stone Sans. I did this because I hoped that by combining the two fonts I would have a good starting point for my development.

Tracing The Serif From Cantoria

Imposing The Serif Stone Sans

Serif Added From Cantoria To Stone Sans

Alphabet Soup Letterforms

Below are the letterforms I produced for the first brief for Alphabet Soup and a brief explanation of each of them.

Alphabet Soup Brief 1

Today was spent finishing developing my letter forms by hand and organising the developments so that they made some sort of logical sense for the crit. I then scanned the final forms in so I could computerise them so I had both hand-drawn outcomes and digital outcomes. Below are photo's of my final letterform sheets, each is A2 as it allowed me to work in the required size multiple times on the same page, allowing for easier comparisons.

Alphabet Soup Brief 1

Today I spent some time developing the final few stages of the letter forms I will present on Friday. This was done by printing, tracing,drawing and scanning certain letters in different styles. I stuck with the letters G, H and T because they were the letters my best initial ideas came with.

An A4 Sheet I Used To Trace My Rescaled Letters And The Fibonacci Curves From

Editing Letters Digitally Was Much Harder Than Doing It By Hand

My Initial Developments Drawn By Hand

Being a fresher.

Photo's of the booklet we produced to solve the problem of how to 

keep fit and healthy on a budget as a fresher at Leeds College of Art.

Hierarchy of Type and Information - Total Film - Product Advert

Hierarchy of Type

Hierarchy of Information

Hierarchy of Type and Information - The Daily Telegraph

Hierarchy of Text

Hierarchy of Information