Typography – WIP

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:

  1. I am allergic to dust.
  2. I was born during the dawn of the computer age.
  3. I find kids annoying.
  4. 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.

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This small but important Microsoft word cursor was added as well.Screen Shot 2016-02-02 at 11.24.52 pm

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:

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Notice the hazy, faint RGB blanket that new flat-screen laptops today do not produce.

 

This was actually pretty fun to do as the process, though long, turned out fruitful. Here are some process shots:

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Looks really complicated, and it is! Thankfully the online guide was very easy to follow:)

 

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:

clippy

Clippy, the nostalgic paperclip. I personally never really liked him.

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.

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Their ads were so witty and entertaining that I almost got carried away with my research.

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:

Typography i find kids annoying

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.

crayon doodle kids

cute, but also kinda creepy.

 

“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:

typortrait batman typortrait heisenberg

 

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:

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gaussian blur because i’m not a selfie kinda guy lol

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