Category Archives: AY1718 S1 Typography1 G3

Project 4: Expressive Typography

Leave a reply

ENDANGERED ANIMALS WITH TYPE

Expanding further from my previous project, 3a (type as image) which I really enjoyed, I decided to make a book of A to Z animals.

Firstly I found animals from A to Z, but I don’t really feel much for it till I stumbled across WWF’s website. You can check it out here: (https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/directory)

They had many animals that are endangered and requires conservation efforts to save them of which touched my heart. So, I decided to raise awareness of these endangered species with a typography book of animals and fonts from A to Z. With that I expanded my project, making the animals using different typefaces and here’s the process:

So firstly, I had to cut up the different typefaces unique to each letter and each animal then using them to fit to the contours of the animal.

As you can tell, I used mainly cut up U(s), brackets, full stop, and other letters like J/L etc.

LAYOUT/PROCESS :

The process was very tedious and time consuming but fulfilling when I put it all together in the end. Here are the final spreads:

I aligned letters and included the name of the animal, conservation status, name of the typeface and the letters of the typeface for reference.

The last 4 panels are my front cover, inner page, prologue and the back cover.

PROCESS:

Before finalising those 4, I consulted Shirley regarding them and got some feedbacks. ‘

The cover page’s font is Castle T Ultra. I used that font since it was the closest I could get to mimic WWF’s customised font.

The font used for my intro/prologue page is Times New Roman since I wanted it to look more professional. Also, for my prologue, I took WWF’s mission and incorporated it in together with my objective of raising awareness for these animals/learn about the typefaces.

BEFORE:

(back cover and front cover)

CONSULTATION:

(front cover)

Comments: My font was too big and it fights for attention together with the animals. Choose a focus, either the font or the animal. Perhaps, add a wash of watercolour to bring out colour and texture to draw attention of reader. Remove unnecessary animals and just keep one as the focus.

 

BEFORE:

(intro/prologue page)

CONSULTATION:

Comments: Unnecessary to repeat title again, so remove it. Why is my name there? What role do I play? The awkward placing of the WWF logo at the corner of the page is weird, so try to text wrap around the logo and there is an orphan word.

 

AFTER:

So after all those consultations, I came up with these 2 cover page, which I narrowed down to the pink/purple as it looks more alarming for endangered animals rather than the blue which seems more calm and serene.

FINAL SPREADS

With that, I came up with my final spreads which were ready to print! Here is the finalised work:

 

PROCESS AND FINAL PRINT OUT:

I decided to make tabs for easier readability and had to cut 1cm away from the inner pages for the tabs to be inserted in and it’s a mess as you can see from the above picture. With the remaining half of the vinyl sticker, I made stickers to share with the class, yay!

I printed the letters that is unique to each font but it looks a little messy and hard to read which then made me decide to standardise the font to Times New Roman.

FINALISED PRODUCT:

REFLECTION

I really like the final outcome of this project. I learnt so much about the different endangered animals and the anatomy of various typefaces.

If I had more time for this project, I would explore further about colouring them and making a larger book so I could include some facts regarding the animals for people to be more aware about saving nature.

All in all, this is a project that I would definitely show people since it was one of the first ever books I made.

That’s all folks!

Project 3C: Type as emotion

Leave a reply

3C – Type as emotion

Type as emotion made me feel like I am doing “my line is emo” from year 1 again but in a digital format. As such, I begun to think about what I felt if I experienced that emotion and then tried to play with the letters “H E L L O” to express that emotion.
I chose Open Sans as my font since it had a large family.

So starting off, we have BORED as the emotion.

BORED:

 

Just a cat/dog’s face and winking + a bored person + a bored person carrying a bag of which I emphasised the “EH” since I was bored when I made these.

  

I was bored and just played around with the letters and realised it forms the words “LOL” and “HOE” and then so I just put these under the emotion, bored. Please pardon me.

 

Moving on, this emotion stands alone.

ARROGANT:

It is the letter “E” being arrogant and wolfing down the other letters, “H, L, L, O”.

 

Next off, we have depressed.

DEPRESSED:

I thought that hello is actually made up of the word “HELL-o” so why not express it in this emotion? Thus, the first picture. Then I had a suggestion from Shirley of moving the words down to the bottom to signify that one is much more depressed instead of it floating around in the middle of the canvas. Furthermore, I changed the colour to a black background and grey words to showcase the emotion even more.

But soon later, I realised that HELL-o was a little common and many people might also think that way. So instead, I wanted something more special. Usually when you are depressed, you want help but you don’t express it out since it isn’t easy to do so. Moving the letters around and overlapping the “L” and “O” actually forms a letter “P”]

 

Moving on to the next emotion, it is confused.

CONFUSED:

I first started off with the emotion, “confused” using different weights of the font. I then changed the arrangement of the letters, keeping only the first and the last letter constant “H” and “O”.

Also, I tried laying black text over the grey text, only showing certain parts of the letter of which might appear confusing to some. But I feel that it is still quite obvious. This particular one could appear as depressed and a whole lot of other emotions too. Hence, I scraped this idea off.

Then,  I tried putting the letters everywhere and rotating them around. But they aren’t confusing enough. So, I realised that I could make it even more confusing by overlapping them and then changing the colour of the overlapped parts to white. Thus, arriving at this, which was my final piece.
(it is hard to even read)

 

Next off, we have angry.

ANGRY:

These are just calling people “HOE” which is mean. But when you are angry, all hell breaks loose so that’s why.

(forgive me)

 

Then we have something happier compared to the negativity before.

EXCITED:

The last picture of excited is the one I chose. It is curved symbolising a rainbow. I made the thickness of the letters increase after every one on purpose to signify the excitement and loudness of this hello.

Here are my final pieces:

Project 3B: Type as pattern

Leave a reply

3B – Type as pattern

Type as pattern for me was the hardest one to execute as I had no sense of direction to start off with. So for a start, I just pieced letters together to form a static pattern.

BUT after consultation I realised that they don’t have much sense of rhythm and it looks really flat.

Here’s some of my static patterns:

Alright, so moving on, I worked on my patterns once more and came up with better patterns to work on with a sense of flow, rhythm and hierarchy. Here are those new patterns:

(it’s a lot because some are either incomplete or that I disliked it)

Then comes another consult. I got some advice to tweak some of the patterns a little more to gain more sense of hierarchy and sense of flow. Hence coming up with these works:

With that, I definitely learn hierarchy and flow in a pattern. And that parts of the type’s anatomy could be a pattern!

These are the final works:

 

Project 3A: Type as image

Leave a reply

 

3A – Type as image

 

Firstly, I started off making outlines of my favourite character, Totoro from Studio Ghibli. I had no idea where I was going, so I showed Shirley this. She then showed me some of the works her other students did and I realised I should’ve worked with serif fonts instead of san serif. Serif fonts gives you much more dimension (eg thick and thin lines) to work with. With that, I started out trying out a serif font, Pistilli.

Working with Pistili, I cut up the fonts into pieces as you can see on the next photo. I cut and pieced them together forming Wall-e and Eve and I’m so happy it turned out great :”)

So here are some of the things I used for Wall-e and Eve:

(I know it’s a mess)

These are my final works :

That’s all for 3A! 🙂

 

Project 2B – Organic Type

Leave a reply

Firstly, I started out wanting to do some origami typography. But it seems like many already exist and Shirley wanted me to do something more than that.

So I went online to look for inspirations. I realised many people have done typography that is similar to the transparency designs I made but none of them have done it with traditional methods.

I decided to pick basic shapes and the primary colours, red, blue and yellow to work on. The quote I came up with was “Work Less Play More”. (I think all of us need that in our current fast paced life) How I came up with the quote was that with shapes and the primary colours, it gives off a vibe that is fun and quirky, nothing serious. So I wanted to incorporate the play factor into my quote.

I cut the basic shapes like: circle, semicircle, rectangle and different sizes of triangles.

Then I had to plan the colours before I put them up so that the letters side by side wouldn’t have the same colour combination. Also, I stuck them up with tape incase I need to change something or rearrange them. When I consulted Shirley, she liked how organic the tape looked on the letters since we cannot create the “bubbles” under the tape digitally.

Also, previously my R looked weird since it was taller than the other letters(left) so Shirley gave some suggestions to switch up how the R looks and here’s how the final one looks like (right)

 

                 BEFORE                                          AFTER

Moving on, here’s what I came up with after scanning it digitally:

 

I had to scan the 2 separately since I laid them out on A3 and my printer could only scan in A4.

Then, I played with the composition on Photoshop. I first tried to emphasize the work LESS, play MORE by playing with the sizes of the text:

Then moving on to another composition which people feel that is easy to read

But I settled on this, which is very uniformed and pleasing when you look at it from afar.

For my application, I printed the format on the box on an A4 paper before I printed on A3. Here are some of the drafts:

(I have no idea why the colour turned out like that but here’s the layout for my box)

The final game box:

(the box is filled up with geometric shapes for one to use their creativity to form things and slowdown to work less and play more in our fast paced world)

 

That’s all folks! 

Thanks for reading 🙂

Project 2A – Vernacular Type

Leave a reply

First off, I started out with the place I wanted to go. It was the CBD (Central Business District). Since Singaporeans are the fastest walkers, with a walking speed of 10.55 seconds/60ft, I wanted to go with a quote like “Not Now, I’m Busy”. But soon after, I decided to go with the phrase “concrete jungle/man made jungle”. (In the end I settled for Man Made Jungle)

All in all, I made 3 trips down to the CBD and 2 out of 3 times, IT RAINED ;-;

During my first trip, I went down to recce the area and took photos like the MBS. But only at the end of the first trip, I realised I wanted to play with the negative spaces. Also, I felt that the negative space typography was clear and straight to the point.

Here are some of the inspirations that i found online which sparked my interest to do so:

Image result for negative space typography photographyRelated image

And then I made a second and third trip down to CBD to find my letters 😀 (I walked around aimlessly tho)

Here are the letters i found:

LETTER D

LETTER E

LETTER G (this was the hardest letter, I only found it at the end of my 3rd trip down to CBD T_T)

LETTER J (the one that made me realised that I could play with negative and positive space)

LETTER L

LETTER M (where my whole project 2a all started out)

LETTER N

LETTER U

LETTER A

I know that some of the letters are black (positive space) and I had to just pick the best of the white letters (negative space) to make it consistent throughout. It was difficult to spot the letters but I guess that is just part of the journey. I realised that if we look closely at a different perspective, typography is everywhere.

Here’s my final piece:

AND I’M VERY HAPPY W HOW IT TURNED OUT (yay)

Thanks for reading 🙂

 

GROUP PRESENTATION: TIMES NEW ROMAN

Leave a reply

FRESH OFF THE PRESS

Have you received a copy of our Limited Edition Times New Roman issue 001?

Well wait no further.

 

TIMES NEW ROMAN

Our final presentation pieces!

  1. Newspapers 
  2. Portraits of Stanley Morrison
  3. Portrait of Stanley Morrison made out of TNR characters

FINAL

Cover Page: A brief introduction of Times New Roman.

Introducing the creators Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent who collaborated and commissioned Times New Romans for The Times in 1929.

Typeface layout- Showcasing Times New Romans.

Spread 1: The beginnings of a classic typeface & how it evolved through time.

A typeface inspired by efficiency and readability, its origins began from Baskerville, Plantin, Imprint, and others.

Significant changes from older types:

Higher X-height

Reduced tracking

Thicker portions of each letter widened

Thinner intersections of the thicker portions

Rounder and condensed look for maximum readibilty

Spread 2: Modern changes to the original typeface and applications of Times New Roman

Keeping Up With The Times

The advent of new technology and newer typefaces meant that Times New Romans needed an upgrade. Hence, the birth of alternatives such as Times Roman, Times Europa, Times Classic, and Times Millenium… just to name a few.

Applications through the years

Originally meant for print, TNR is a great body text and has been widely used in the formal publishing industry- newspapers, books, and legal documents. However, it has slowly been replaced by updated typefaces and though ubiquitous, it is seldom used as a major typeface.

Instead, people use it out of habit or because of its long-standing legacy.

TNR connotes an apathetic, non-choice typeface.

Spread 3: Opinions on the classic typeface and activities

To be honest, we can all agree that Times New Roman is increasingly labelled as “outdated” and “old”, and rarely used today. Even so, it has found its way into the design industry, with some designers intentionally using Times New Roman to produce some amazing works. We also included some fun activities for our classmates to try as we realised that Times New Roman looked similar to many other fonts. The activity helps them to see the difference between these fonts and Times New Roman and identify what makes Times New Roman unique, that stands out from these fonts.

PROCESS & RESEARCH

Reference books that we borrowed from the library.

These books really helped us a lot in our research and finding images for the uses of Times New Roman. The books also had information on the newer typefaces such as Times Classic and Times Millennium, which was hard to dig out from the internet, where a lot of information was unreliable.

Working on the layout of our version of The Times newspaper.

We wanted to keep it as authentic as possible, hence referring to the original layout of The Times. We started with a blank canvas and added in each element one by one. As we needed to fill up the pages but also keep it concise and readable, we had to pick and choose the information we wanted to add in, rephrasing certain parts to fit the page better. It was very time consuming but worth it when we saw the final product!

The planning of the pages of our newspaper! (it took us so long to come up with the layout)

Before and after photos of how we made Stanley Morison’s Typographic portrait

A typographic portrait of our lecturer Shirley 😀

We changed the original layout a little, reducing the thickness of the box, making it more appealing

 

A3 size for peers on the left and A1 size for presentation on the right.

MESS AT THE PRINTING SHOP (it cost us like $23 to print because none of the printing shop could print in A1 except one) But we were happy with how it turned out so it all worked out in the end.

PRESENTATION DAY

Shirley recording us present :’) while our peers are listening attentively!

  DONE AND OVER WITH PRESENTATION YAY.

 

Done by team TNR : Vanessa, Zoelyn, Brenda and Zoe (left to right)