TYPOGRAPHY PROJECT IV: EXPRESSIVE TYPOGRAPHY

I had just recently gone for the Crazy Horse Paris show at MBS and was really inspired by the visuals so when I created these burlesque images in Project “Type as Image”, I was very excited to continue them for my last typo project.

At first I wanted to do a poster of a “upcoming” Burlesque show and a brochure one would get at a show with instructions on how to dance beginner burlesque – all using type as image but Shirley advised against it and instead recommended to use Gestalt law instead. So basically use elements of the show in conveying the message of the show.

So I researched on minimal posters:

Related image

And So It Goes... • Malika Favre

movie poster art | ... > No153 My The Rocky Horror Picture Show minimal movie poster

I decided to play around with colours as well because it was no longer limited to just black and white. After researching into some of the fonts typically used by Burlesque, I decided to go with Riesling and Budmo to create the image due to the curves of the font.

Image result for burlesque fonts riesling

And if you recall from my Organic Type project, I created my own font that was textured like lips – which I thought was very apt to utilise on the poster as well.

This was my first draft and after consultations with Shirley, she pointed out that one would not know that it was made up of the anatomy of the typeface as they simply look like vectors. So she pointed me in the direction of using anatomy to create the shadows of the image.

Some examples:
Typography / Albert Einstein

Typographic Portraits by Peter Strain More

Essentially using size, colour and also the spacing between each element to convey depth.

So I experimented with it.

With visual references.

It was a very very tedious process and wasn’t easy but I did enjoy it nonetheless because when the results eventually showed through my work, I could really see the shadows and the rounded form of the leg, and it was satisfying.

This took me more than 6 hours straight definitely. But as I wanted to make it into a series of 3 posters, I continued with other elements of Burlesque, like lips and corsets.

I also used a spotlight effect for the background as I wanted something simple but could convey the message of it being a show poster, so it seems like the spotlight illuminates the feature points of what you will see at the show.

Process:

References:

FINAL

Typography I: Project 3A, 3B, 3C

Project 3A: Typography as Image

As I read the brief wrongly, I thought we could do something more conceptual so I took one of the scenes from my favourite movies ‘Closer’ and used text to incorporate the character’s quotes from the movie to form the outline of the image.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So after an E-consult with Shirley I realised that I did it wrongly so I quickly adapted to the proper brief. But it’s still a little different as I realised we could cut up the font. I just wanted to include what I did because it is a little funny hahaha.

I chose this image as I could visualise using the different fonts to form the image like ‘Y’ could be used as the martini glass.

Work In Progress:

So eventually I finally caught on to the brief and this was what I came up with. I laid out the font choice on Illustrator to reference back and forth on the anatomy of the font to pick out the parts to use to form the image.

This was pretty straightforward (even though it took me soooo long to do it hahaha) and I enjoyed this project a lot because even though it was tedious, it was fun to pick out the parts of the anatomy of fonts to form the image.

I used the font ‘Didot‘ because I feel that the font has a great contrast between the thick and thin strokes and it would be better to use it to form the curves of the ladies in the images. And also, I was very inspired by Burlesque imagery after watching the Crazy Horse show.

FINAL

 

Project 3B: Typography as Pattern

One of my biggest struggles was Type as Pattern as you can see from my experimentations.

I thought we were supposed to use the whole font of the typeface to form the patterns so these were the first two I tried out using ‘A’ and ‘I’ respectively to create repeating patterns.

But after consult with Shirley, I realised that we were supposed to cut up the anatomy to make the type unrecognisable.

So these 3 are fonts cut up that I was experimenting with. It was soooo tough to get a pattern that I actually liked, all of them are pretty meh to me. This was truly the project that made me struggle with the most.

I also had difficulty figuring out which part of the font to cut up to make the basic shape for the pattern.

So I decided that perhaps I could use a reference image of a pattern to form using fonts.

So I pulled up this reference image to help inspire my design.
Using the letter ‘e’ and cutting it into half, I recreate the design and incorporated a few white overlays to make texture as well.

I chose to use ‘e’ because I think that there’s a certain direction to it depending on its positioning and it would be interesting to vary it to make the pattern.

For the other pattern, I was intrigued to use the tail end of the letter ‘Q’ because I realised that different fonts have very differing structures to that particular portion.

So I played around with it and created an ice cream swirl or snail shaped unit and duplicated it and played around with the positioning and scale.

In the end, I settled for a larger scale with lesser units instead of many smaller units. It kinda looks like a meteorite shower of snails or ice cream. And I also like how it has a leading line as well.

FINAL

 

Project 3C: Typography as Emotion

This is my type as emotion for the emotion: shy
Quite self-explanatory. Small, thin and hidden in a corner = shy.

This is my type as emotion for the emotion: Passive aggressive

I wanted to make it hidden because it’s passive yet bold and loud because its also being aggressive. Not sure if it is effective or not.

This is my type as emotion for the emotion: Distracted
Using all caps because it is constantly forgetting that it started out with a caps already. So every letter is the beginning of a new word that it wants to write but forgets because its distracted. Could also be forgetful?

This is my type as emotion for the emotion: seductive
I wanted to emphasise the HELL in Hello, if you try to imagine it in a seductive voice it will kind of waver as well.
Like: “well, HELLo there ;)”
I then realised that I was working on some emotions that were not mentioned in the brief so I had to change and adapt a few.
But I wanted to keep to this clean and minimalistic outlook to challenge myself to communicate emotions with just the font. And I used Arial as there are a few variations of the font (like the weight) to play with.

FINAL

To me, annoyance is rolling your eyes and saying ‘pppftt’ and then accidentally on purpose cause something to annoy the person back. I used Arial Narrow to make it very thin, and flipped it around at a weird angle and also reflected it such that when you look at the word at any angle it would still not read the way that we are used to. And I also made it such that it sits randomly within the space and very near the edge of the page (so that people would feel annoyed that its so near the point of being cut off).

For seductive, I imagine a sexy wavy voice coming from a corner from a dark room. So that’s what I did with the font.

I put it in a dark background and created a wave using differing baselines. I also used Arial in Italics so there’s an accent to the word thus emphasizing the sultry voice of the font.

As for depressed, I used Arial Bold to make a very heavy weighted font. I also increased the kerning so that it would fill the entire bottom of the space. I didn’t make the space black because to me depression is a dark emotion in the midst of a happy space. And it is cut off at the bottom because the ‘hello’ is sinking deeper and deeper into nothingness.

And finally for confused, I used varying styles of the font Arial like regular, italics and bold to convey confusion. And I also flipped and rearranged some of the fonts to read differently from how it’s usually read. And its also scattered randomly to convey confusion as well.

Overall I didn’t exactly enjoy this project because of some of the struggles I had and it was very frustrating and time consuming but I do agree that there are some important takeaways about how we can use fonts for so many other purposes other than communicate text.

TYPOGRAPHY I: ORGANIC TYPE

I was searching for a quote online when I arrived at this one which I thought was quite interesting to explore. It was pretty clear to use red to bring forward the idea of ‘lust’, and the element of ‘bite’ I was thinking could be represented by lips or lipsticks.

Initially it felt like red lipstick was the way to go but I wanted to explore another way of representation such as using the texture of lips.

I saw this tin cupcake holder thing in class while we were selecting materials for our mark-making and I thought that the edges of it looked like the cracked texture of our lips. So I traced out lip shapes with foam paper and glued the textured aluminium on top of it so that it would imprint the texture.

However, I couldn’t quite get the texture of the lips right because the metal was not soft enough to be moulded and stamped properly. It created gaps between the foam paper and the paper itself so it was hard to get the paint to adhere to the surface. It was very uneven.

So I decided to scrape the idea of using aluminium. And instead I tried to make direct cuts into the foam paper using a pen knife.

I REALLY loved the quality this gave to the print, because I could really bring out the details of the lips in this way. I was really happy with the way that the ‘U’ came out because it really looks like the edges of lips.

So I decided to pursue this method for the rest of my letterings.

However, the downside to using this technique was the improbability of getting a ‘perfect’ print. More often than not I had to try and cut out multiple letters and each of them only had a certain number of times they could be used because of how malleable the material is. It was easily destroyed after a few stamps due to the cuts I made with the pen knife.

It was also not easy to use this technique on letters such as ‘I’, ‘L’ and ‘T’ where they don’t have counters to create the lip markings. They were also the most easily destroyed letters due to their long stems. 

So here is what my quote looks like with all the organic types. I added my lipstick mark as well for effect.

Next I wanted to create a mock up for condoms using my quote but I had a lot of difficulty doing up the condom wrapper itself to look real.

But eventually I figured out a way to do it by overlaying it over an actual condom wrapper.

I designed the box according to your the theme of lips as well so that all the fonts and vibe will tie in together.

Overall thoughts for project 2b:

I feel that it is such an important project to bring forth the early conventions of using handmade fonts. It is true that with technology, all these handmade elements would slowly disappear, but yet this project reminds us of how relevant it still is to this day. So I think that this was an important project to showcase that.

The end.

 

TYPOGRAPHY I: VERNACULAR TYPE

PROCESS

Location: Clarke Quay

Words associated with location: Night life, bars, clubs, shopping, tourist attraction, food, restaurant, colourful, neon lights

Concept: Clarke Quay at night = All about the night life!

Quote: “One More Shot”

Photos shot at Clarke Quay

Looking out for letters in random objects was definitely a huge challenge. As I went alone to shoot, I was shooting practically everything in sight so I could go back and review the photos and find certain cropping to make sense of the letters. But I realised very quickly that it was not a good strategy, so I decided to look out for colours and backgrounds that stood out to me more.

That worked out for the better as I could isolate letterings more and also it gave an overall vibe to the typography – colourful neon lights; which definitely brought forward the characteristic of my location, Clarke Quay.

Initial Design:

The irregularity of the size of the letterings was something that made me feel a little annoyed. I also felt that all the letters that made up the word ‘more’ were not very in sync with each other. It prompted me to go back and search for other possibilities.

Searching for ‘r’ was the hardest for me as I just couldn’t see it. But it was until I was sifting through my images in class that Shirley pointed one of the signboards that could make my letter ‘r’. Yayyyy so happy.

I also adjusted the sizes so that they were all the same height and hence created my final:

I really prefer the layout to be even, just like how it is here because I think it’s a good way of bringing across the message of how a person is not wasted enough, hence he/she needs to take ‘One More Shot’.

That’s the essence behind my vernacular type.

 

TAKEAWAYS

I feel that this project really challenged me to view things out of the ordinary. Walking around Clarke Quay looking for letters really made me appreciate the elements that make up Clarke Quay as well. I also enjoyed the challenge set to us by Shirley because we were restricted to not use any physical letters that were already used in signboards, and that made us step out further to find the letters which I felt really make our work stand out more because of this difficulty.