Not just fleurons //5
This brief I started out knowing I wanted
to design a typeface but it took me along time to actually think about it as at
first I had no inspiration but after looking in tons of books and websights at
different designs I found a website which is on my blog on a girl who designed
the front cover of arts magazine and I really liked it as it was all hand
rendered and was very detailed. So with this in mind I decided I want to makek
a hand rendered type face, I had never done this before so it was something new
as I don’t normally draw things by hand these days. So I started out by just
drawing plants and features of flowers and I was going to design a typeface
with lots of little plants making up the letters but I didn’t really like the
design, thought it was a little too obvious designing a typeface for plants,
using plants. So I started looking at petals ans started freely drawing spirals
and petals and wavy lines and then I making all the shapes fit, and this is
when I came up with what my typeface would look like.
I decided to use a serif font because I
knew I wanted to keep the typeface simple and with a sans serif the legibility
would be lowered, so I decided on Impact as it was bold and big and easy to
read when covered with spirals.
At this point, I had a laser cutting
induction so I knew I wanted to experiment with different materials and not
just print onto paper. My original thought was to lut the letters out of
acrylic but I wanted to keep it as environmentally friendly as possible.
Drawing out the letters was extremely time
consuming however very theraputic. The first time I drew ut the whole alphabet
I used a green fineliner but it wasn’t a very good pen and left a lot of bleed
so when I scaned it in it wouldn’t live trace very well and I could not of gone
over it as it would take far too long so I just drew each letter out again
using the finest black fine liner I had, and I did a few tests and that
appeared to scan a lot clearer.
After my crit with Fred he told me to add this
brief with the typeface brief and produce another typeface so I had a set of 3.
However, it was much easier said then done. I did make this into a book with
the French fold but when it came to designing another typeface I just couldn’t
think of anything new and I felt as though the typeface I was doing was rushed
and ineffective, so I srapped that idea and made the ‘not just fleurons’ brief
a separate brief again.
