This project was a fun one to work on: We had to spell our names out with a relation to whatever it is we decided to describe ourselves with.
The premise of this project gave me many ideas I wanted to work on.
After consultations, I was given an important piece of advice, which was to create a theme, or a collective mood, of the series of typographic compositions I was to create.
I decided to go with the idea of being simple, yet witty.
As such, these are the captions I decided to work on:
- I am allergic to dust.
- I was born during the dawn of the computer age.
- I find kids annoying.
- I am Jacob.
“I am allergic to dust.”
For this composition, I will attempt to create my name with a runny nose; said nose will represent the letter ‘A’ in my name. The nose will be made from clay. To make things more relevant, I will place a layer of grey ‘dust’ (probably felt wool) as the background of this composition. To keep things 2D, I will take a photo of the final piece to print out. I am hoping this will turn out well during the presentation.
“I was born during the computer age.”
I felt that this piece should represent the thing that we 90s kids would be very familiar with. Therefore, I chose to emulate the past Microsoft word document font. Back then, Times New Roman was the default font, and was also the most accepted font in school.
This small but important Microsoft word cursor was added as well.
After consultations, however, I was inspired to push the already familiar text a step further. I took the advice of adding an old school ‘screen’ effect to the composition.
Examples:
This was actually pretty fun to do as the process, though long, turned out fruitful. Here are some process shots:
The tutorial for this effect can be found online here:
http://layersmagazine.com/simulating-a-computer-screen-in-adobe-photoshop.html
And finally, the icing on the cake:
I remember how he was always there to aid, but was never really much help. #Aforeffort
“I find kids annoying.”
To tackle this piece, I decided to tackle to root cause of the problem. We all know what causes kids, and we all know the preventive measures. So I decided to do a little research on a particular household brand.
Subtle as it was, the logo itself was distinguishable enough. There was little I had to do for others to see the relation in this, even without the product replacing the letter ‘O’ in my name:
Again, I was encouraged to push this even further, by including the Ⓡ symbol in this piece.
Wiki time:
“The enclosed R or circled Latin R (Ⓡ or ⓡ) is a typographical symbol. As one of many enclosed alphanumerics, the symbol is an “R” within a circle. Its most notable usage is as the registered trademark symbol.”
However I was told, with good reason, that I may not be sending the message I intend to, which was that I do not want kids (at least not now). I had to include something to show my audience that message.
This led me to download some Photoshop crayon brush presets:) There’s something about kids being almost synonymous to whimsical crayon doodles, and I hope I can use this to bring forth the right message this time.
“I am Jacob.”
For this final piece, I wanted to do a reversal of the project. Instead of introducing my name first in the typographic artwork, I decided to introduce the adjectives and things that make me into the composition, and end it off with my name as the caption. Since there were so many things I wanted to include in this piece, I decided to employ the concept of a typographic portrait.
Some super cool examples:
Portraits like these are fairly common. However, I felt that since this was a multiple item project, I wanted to give the whole thing a bit of a narrative, where this wraps everything up on a nice note. After all, pictures of one’s self comes to mind when one says “This is me.”.
Some process shots: