Project 3c: Type as Emotion

For project 3c, we had to express the word “HELLO” in the following moods: friendly, angry, seductive, confused, arrogant, depressed, annoyed, excited, bored. I used the font Gill Sans for all of the compositions. 

This was the first I thought of. I combined a variety of “hellos” with different opacities together to give the illusion of a blurred out hello much like how you feel when you’re confused by something. 

Initially I struggled with what else to do but as I played around with the letterforms, I realised that I could make a stick figureman out of the letters and tada this was what I came out with– a depressed stickman about to commit suicide.

If you look closely, you would be able to find the misspelled “Holle”, but if you couldn’t you would probably be feeling pretty annoyed. I intentionally misspelled hello this manner to make it even harder for the viewer to find the misspelled word by just shifting the “e” and “o” but keeping the rest of the letters. This made the misspelled hello blend in better with the rest of the hellos, making it harder to find the word and brings out the feeling of annoyance better. 

Much like your attention span, it starts out focused and bold but as time progresses and the feeling of boredom kicks in, you would slowly lose focus and attention, much like how the letter form slowly drops down and fades off. 

Other designs that didn’t make the cut.

 

Project 3b: Type as Pattern

For project 3b, we had to create a series of patterns using a single letterform and copy and repeat it to make an overall pattern. 

I started out with these 2 patterns and experimented with cutting up the text and playing with negative and positive spaces. However, after consult, Shirley said that I could try playing with more variations in sizes and density of text placement instead of just a flat repeated pattern. 

I started out with the pattern on the left and I really liked how it turned out using the descender of the “J”. It ended up looking like those telephone coil wires. The right pattern is the final edit after consult where I added a gradient and shortened the “J”. I think the spacing between the individual units and the gradient as well as the arrangement of the units along the same line really helped to create this 3 dimensional illusion. 

A few other patterns that I experimented with. 

FINAL PICKS:

Project 3a: Type as Image

For this project, we had to create a series of images using one traditional typeface and making use of the different weight of the type to create our image. 

While I was thinking of what image to do, I knew I wanted to do something intricately detailed and the first thing that came to mind were shophouses. I love the details and ornamentation of shophouses in Singapore and I really wanted to try it out to see what I could come up with. 

I chose a san serif font because I wanted something more structured and angular with less “curves” to really show the details of the patterns created and I went with Avenir because it had the largest family of fonts. I love how after stretching and manipulating the type, I was actually able to get a variety of thickness in the composition. 

In my second image, I wanted to do something related to local flavour so I went with traditional nonya kuehs. 

I decided to go with a serif font for a change from the previous image. It was really fun experimenting the different typefaces and figuring out ways of incorporating it into an image.