– Organic FINAL –
18 x 18cm Letterhead (below)
Why? How?
So for this assignment, I wanted something that would give my letterheads texture. So I kept thinking of materials that people hadn’t used before in their assignment. At first I was thinking of using Coffee beans to create my type, but at the same time, that was quite a common way of doing text.
So I tried another method of using crystals to give me the rugged and raw texture (will show at the end below my experimentation with the crystals). BUT!! It didn’t work out. And from there I had a EUREKA MOMENT that would give me the raw and rugged feel, which was of course TOBACCO!
I really liked the messy scattering that the organic material had. I felt it gave the text CHARACTER!
Below is a short little mood board that i came up with when i was thinking of using ciggs or tobacco to form my text.
Tagline
So since i was thinking of using tobacco to form my words i went to search online for random tagline and i came across the one i’m using.
“Cancer is the cure to Smoking”. It was either that or “Cancer cures Smoking”
I had tried both but, at the end of the day, i felt the first tagline looked better as a whole rather than the latter.
Organic Process
So going about shaping my letters, I bought the tobacco and arranged my type. I noticed my type itself started to look a bit like COMIC SANS! HAHHAHAA. But i actually liked the way it shaped out. So i just continued as it was.
Again, i really liked the fact that it was a bit messy and how there were shadows caused by the tobacco sticking out here and there.
I initially thought of adding a cigarette stick and messing up the letters like above, but of course, then the text wouldn’t be seen. So of course i went back to just shaping my text accordingly, word by word.
The above was when i was still trying my luck of burning the tobacco to give it the extra effect. It didn’t really work, and i decided that i preferred the original feel of the tobacco without any distractions. A bit more consistent that way as well.
Composition!!!
I played around with the contrast and the colours. I really liked the effect when i brought up the shadows and brought down the blacks. I felt it made the colours pop a lot more (a bit more boomz). I decorated it a little bit more as well, adding more “splatterings” of tobacco and cigarette paper and filters.
I mentioned above that i was trying to figure out which tagline to go with. So below was when i tried out the “Cancer cures Smoking”. But i felt that it was very empty, so i decided to go back to having the longer tagline. Even though the longer tagline goes over the ideal 25 characters (with space) that was mentioned in the brief, i still felt that longer tagline suited what i was trying to achieve and go for. Hence the final product.
Horizontal placement (experimentation) below: I experimented with landscape arrangement and didn’t really like it. Because when I arranged it, i was going towards making it look like a poster, in other words, portrait. And the landscape view didn’t really have the feel that i was going for either. To me there wasn’t much flow in the arrangement below either.
Above is when i finally printed out my assignment. I had tried printing on 2 types of paper. One was with 250GSM gloss paper and laser printer (the right), the other was with a 170GSM Matte photo paper with an ink printer (left). You cant really tell the difference from the image below, but it makes a lot of difference when seeing it up close.
I decided to stick with the 250GSM gloss paper and laser printer because it made the colours and words pop out a lot more. So i stuck with that paper all the way through. I didn’t want to use texture paper because i felt the style i was going for didn’t suit the whole texture paper, especially since my organic text already had the texture.
Digital Simulation!
So the above were my simulations on how my typography with tobacco, along with the tagline, could be used for the Health Promotion Board. It can be used as posters, cigarette packaging or shirt designs. All to encourage people to quite smoking.
I actually really liked it on the shirt. It looked quite good as a campaign shirt and tagline. Granted of course it may not be the most sensitive tagline and might offend people. But the tagline itself made sense in some form when relating to the “I QUIT” campaign. Therefore I decided to use that as my simulation.
MY OTHER EXPERIMENTATION
This was where I wanted to tie this assignment with another assignment that i was doing. I was trying to grow salt crystals, so i shaped cardboard and tried letting the crystals grow on the letter to give it that texture. Unfortunately it didn’t work out, the salt crystals didn’t grow properly, either because i put into wrong amount of chemicals and solution, or not enough salt.
Below is a short video of how it looked like. My attempt.
Below is sort of the effect that i wanted to do. Put the cardboard letter became to flimsy due to the liquid, and the crystals didn’t grow properly either. Nonetheless, it was an interesting attempt.
CONCLUSION
So in conclusion, Assignment 2B was quite an interesting one where experimentation was very important. Starting from arranging the words with organic materials, to editing and arranging it on photoshop, it was quite a tedious process, but I learnt that there’s actually a lot of meaning from all the small little details that I added into my assignment. For example, the colours made a difference to the entire feel of the tagline. Texture as well is veryyyyy important.
So all in all, it was quite a fun assignment, especially because it was very hands on as well.