Typography - Alphabet

In my Typography class we have been designing a typeface. :) Honestly it kind of sucks.... but its kind of fun? Maybe...

Assignment

With the aid of FontStruct, design a modular typeface inspired by a historical model. Scan
through old type specimens and closely examine them. FontStruct comes with the limitation that it can only build the letterforms with modular blocks. It is not expected, or desired, that your final typeface be an exact replica. They should feature traits of your source material, like weight, contrast, proportions and emotion.
You may choose any genre you like, from the early humanist serifs, to wild west wood type, to geometric sans serifs. The result can be a hybrid of styles, but be careful not to make a frankenstein. Always remember that type is meant to be read. Complex designs bring more opportunities for distraction. Try to pull from older sources, rather than only contemporary designers.

Process Outline

• Moodboards (2 options)

Fill at least one 8.5" × 11" page with images of inspirational typeface specimens (at least 5).
Also list five keywords that describe the direction (e.g. chunky, airy, soft, hyper, quiet...).

• Sketches (3 options)

Study your inspiration, and sketch, sketch, sketch the possibilities! Bring all variations, but
present your three strongest ideas. Each should be on a separate 8.5" × 11" page, showing your
base glyphs(nobae), as well as one whole word. Pen or pencil only.

• Rough Alphabet

Black and white printouts of all glyphs. The x-height should be between 6-15 units high.

• Final Speciman 

Present your work on a poster. All glyphs must appear somewhere on the poster. Look back to
the specimens for examples and inspiration.




Here are my 2 Moodboards:

Here are my 3 sketches of my directions I could have gone off of:

 My printout of my rough alphabet:

Here's also the letter I had the most trouble with:

And lastly my process of my final layout of the alphabet and examples of words and sentences:

Typography - Design Exercise

In class yesterday (the 10th) we did an in-class exercise. It was very challenging but very fun :) There were a lot of restrictions; we had to design 4 pages of the same information:
(Title)
Thinking With Type
(Author)
Ellen Lupton
(header)
A critical guide for designers, writers, editors, & students
(publisher)
Princeton Architectural Press, New York
(what's new in this edition)
Second revised and expanded edition
More principles, examples, exercises, type crimes, fonts, factoids and fun
(another odd bit)
A design handbook

The restrictions changed for each page:

Page 1
All the same size text, font, weight. No all caps, color changes, underlines or boxes.
Page 2
Same restrictions as page one, but you may use two fonts, weight changes and all caps.
Page 3
Same restrictions as page two, but you may now change sizes.
Page 4
Anything goes!

Here is what I came up with for each :) I hope you like them!

Pages 1 and 2

Pages 3 and 4

Type Poster

In my Art 120 class we were given an assignment to design a poster using type. We had to chose song lyrics or poetic verse of 8-10 words to use as the content and inspiration for a typographic poster. I went through a lot of variations before I came to the final product. You can see my process work here. Below is my final version I turned in.

Letter Anatomy

Last week in my design class we were learning about Letter Anatomy. In that link you will find the terminology we went over with explanations and terminology of different parts of letters. Who knew typography was so technical :) In addition to learning these terms, we also had to trace 2 capital A's and 2 capital G's, 2 lower case a's and 2 lower case g's in different fonts. Then we had to pick a font he had printed out (4 options) and trace and fill in the WHOLE alphabet, upper and lowercase.