Module TFD1064. Design for Communication DesignGraphic design group Project – “Artist typeface” StudentStudent numberContact details

Module TFD1064.

Artist Typeface Dean Scicluna U1154130

07811679667

Initial Research

My initial research started off with looking at what made a font, the basic fundimentals that make up each letter, ty-pography wasn’t a stong point of mine to start of with, so right off the bat i was excited for this project as i knew i’d be learning a lot. once these were understood, i quickly searched the internet for some typeface designs that i liked, just so i could have an idea from the start how i want my final pieces to be like.

Initial Research

Using abude-ezo.com and inspirationfeed.com i found these facinat-ing designs which majorly impressed me, these were done by truely amazing de-signers and i hope my final typeface can come close to these.

i began to think about the different major art movements to find different artists which could influence a typeface, this started with a mind map just remembering the art movements i knew already and liked such as Modernism, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Post Modernism etc. These were movements that i thought could be transpired into good artist type faces, so i decided to expand on a few of these.

Art Movements

Art Movements -Bauhaus

I started by looking at Bauhaus from the Modernism movement which was between 1919-1933, i looked at my 2 favourite designers from that period, Marcel Breuer and Wassily Kandinsky, in these early stages i just briefly wrote down what i knew about them.

A lot of Marcel Breuers work was furniture design, he followed the Bauhaus’ simple rules of form follows function, meaning lots of his products wern’t so aesthetically pleasing but they fit their functions. There was a lot of cylindrical forms from the chair legs so i sketched out some basic shapes from what i had seen on his chairs and tables

Kandinsky on the other hand was more of a painter, mainly doing abstract work which used your basic geo-metric shapes of circles squares and triangles. Again i sketched out a few basic shapes for now influenced by what i had seen in his paint-ings.

Art Movements - Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau was a move-ment that came out of France in the 1890-1910, verysimular to Artsand crafts in thesense it uses a lot of long sinuous line but the main difference is the use of the female form, a lot of Japanese art influ-enced Art Nouveau and the use of geshas in the art, so this showed through on the art created in this movement. Characteristics included long flowing hair, long curled lines and styl-ised flowers.

First artist i looked at was Gus-tav Klimt, an Australian painter, his work reflected the move-ment very well, there was lots of elongated curled lines, as well as the use of the female form. After looking more in depth into Gustavs work, i don’t think he will be one of the artists i take forward.

Louis Comfort Tiffany was my other artist choice from the Art Nouveau move-ment.

A lot of Louis work was masake based, he made a lot of stained glass, they had flower forms within but this was only identifiable by the colours he used in his work. I started to sketch out a couple letter using this mosake style, But i’m not sure how good of a font this could make.

Art Movements - Arts + Crafts

I moved on to look at the Arts and Crafts movement and again mind mapped the 2 main artists i knew, Wil-liam Morris and Charles Ren-nis Mackintosh. The Arts and Crafts movement started when artists were concerned about industrialisation taking over the country and wanted to bring back traditional hand made products.

These 2 artists had very dif-ferent styles, William Morris’ involved using lots of very nat-ual forms, long sinuous lines and using leaves, plants, roots and living animals in his work, i started by sketching out some quick letters and i quite liked the idea of a font like this.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh also used some natural forms in his glass pieces, but in his furni-ture, was a lot different to Mor-ris’ work, he made lots of over sized products using very straight lines, it was almost reminiscent of Bauhaus, but at the same time wasn’t given the use of too much material.

Art Movements - Post ModernismPhillippe Starck

Phillippe Starck is easily one of my favourite designers and has been for a good few years, as one of the most famous current product designers, he falls into the Post Modernism move-ment, a lot of Phillippes designs don’t follow the normal aspects of design, in the way that Bauhaus designs use form follows function, Starcks designs often use function follows form, this is shown with some of his most famous designs, the lemon squeezer and the hot bertaa ket-tle. I watched Phillippe Starcks: Design and Destiny talk, which was a great talk he did which opened my eyes to a lot of things. As a lot of Starcks designs are so different to each either, he doesnt have a particular style to copy for a font, so i took out a book full of his designs and looked for anything that resembled letters, and then i would use them drawn up as the alphabet, i sketched out quickly some of the letters i might use.

Art Movements - Streamline ModernRaymond Loewy

Raymond Loewy is again one of the most famous designers, and in my opinion is one of the best designers ever, he fell under the Streamline Modern movement, when someone mentions this movement, the first person you think of is Ray-mond Loewy, such an influentual designer that came from so little. He designed lots of logos that are still used these days, one of the most famous being the Shell logo. As the name suggests, designs from this movement where often streamline, as cars and trains got invented with better aerodynamics, products began to replicate these designs, they often had rounded edges, horizontal grooves and chrome designs.

Artist FontsWilliam Morris

I decided to briefly experiment with William Morris and designing a font influenced by him, I had really good ideas for doing a font using his work, but as designs went on, and i started making sketches, this became less the case. I started off by drawings a curvy alphabet without taking my pencil off the page, this meant i had to curve into new letters and i did it so fast i couldn’t give myself time to stop and think what i was doing, this turned out to be midly sucessful as i designed 6 letters on my first try that i really liked, but at the same time i designed 20 letters i wouldn’t even consider twice. I then designed an alphabet slowly thinking about how i would do each letter, and again some of these came out well and others didn’t, but this was enough for me to decided that i wouldn’t be able to design a William Morris font that i would like, it’s not my design style and wouldn’t end up being my best of work, so i decided to leave it there.

Artist FontsCharles Rennie Mackintosh

One of my final 3 was Charles Rennie Mackintosh the designer from the Arts and Crafts movement. My font is based on his furniture design, with these very straight edges and short lines connecting onto other parts of the chair with strong right angles and subtle angles, i think this was a font i really liked, you can make the direct relation to the designers work just by looking at the font, and it is easy enough to make into bold, italic and other variables.

Here is how the font turned out once de-signed and scaled to a grid, there are a few adjustments i’d want to make, but overall quite happy with this font.

Artist Fonts Raymond Loewy

Moving onto my second artist was Raymond Loewy, again as his designs were so broad the only thing simular was they were streamline, so i stuck with the rules of Streamline Moderne more, using the rounded edges, horizontal grooves and saw how that went

After drawing up the font to L i wasn’t liking it that much, so i thought i would put it to comput-er and scale it to see if it looked any better, and it did, but not enough for me to persue it, so I de-cided to leave this font here and stick with Mar-cel Breuer.

Artist FontsMarcel Breuer

So i started designing my font and research-ing these artists more in depth, Marcel was the first to develop tublar steel legs on chairs and this be-came his main focus of his work.

Later on in his career, Breuer started experimenting with more oval shaped legs on his chairs and then even later on he started using flat wood, i wanted to base my font on these, how the chair legs would look in the shape of an alphabet, so i started sketching up.

Designing Final Font

After messing around a little with some letters and doing quick experiment sketches, i decided to draw up a grid and get sketching the letters from A-ZBy the end of this, i was pretty happy with the font ive gone for and think it replicates the legs on Breuers chairs later on in his career

Designing FinalFont

This is how the font looked once digi-talised and scaled. Some letters i was a lot happier with than others, but this is what i was going forward with.

Adjustments

I then thought to make ad-justments and variables to my font i could add shadows to the letters, this would give it more of a 3D feel to it and would make understanding the font a lot easier. This add-ed to the font greatly and i thought it made it look a lot better.

The whole font scaled and shaded.It started to look more proffesional and i liked it alot.

Colour Font

From here i wanted to add another version to the font, and add colour to it, my 2 ob-vious choices were steel and wood, and as i had no idea how to make a wooden ef-fect, i tried to make a steel ef-fect and see how that turned out.Overall i thought it was pretty sucessful and once again added something, now it rep-licated the legs of the chairs even more.

Adjustments

From here the next obvious thing to do was to add shad-ing onto the letters. with the steel colour on. This was my fa-vourite of all the fonts i had made and it was really start-ing to come to life.

Cinema 4D Experiments

Cinema 4D is a great 3D rendering program that i’ve been trying to get to grips with and thought this would be a perfect opportunity to do so. So i opened it up and started trying to design the alphabet with this, I started with the letter A and my initial instinct was to add the wood effect to the letters, but this didn’t look good, it just didn’t fit well, so i went with the tube steel edge and again didn’t give me the 3D effect i was

Looking for, so i put in the steel effect and added a HDRI background to give me detail, this turned out more sucessful but, so i moved on to designing the letter I, i couldn’t fully get to grips with the pen tool in this program so the I wasn’t perfect but still looked good, it was only when designing the letters M and U i realised that i wouldnt be able to use this program just yet for this project as my knowledge of the program wasn’t great enough, i still learnt a lot from experime-menting on it though

Adjustments - Lower Case

Another adjustment to my font i decided to look at was doing a lower case for it. i be-gan sketching these out with a pen real quickly and is rap-idly became something i was considering adding, i didn’t have to do the whole alpha-bet as some letters were the same but smaller, but here’s what i came up with for the lower case.

Lowercase - Adjustments

So i put it on illustrator and scaled it all, i wasn’t so sure, and so i added the shadowing and then the steel effect to it, and it just didn’t appeal to me so much, i just thought the font looked better all as one case but using smaller letters for the lower case, i have seen many fonts do it like this, and it works well, i thought it also worked well for mine, so i decided to stick to that and not use lowercase

Adjustments - Bold/ Black

I began to think how i could make a bold font work, i thought about designing the whole font again using thicker metal, I began trying to do this and it just wasn’t working well, so i had the idea to inverse my whole regu-lar font, so the inside is black and the lines which make up the letters then become negitive space which then still gives the letters that 3D feel, i thought this looked great and was dead pleased with this version of the font.

Specimen Sheet 60pt.

72pt.

84pt.I decided to use the quick brown fox pangram as for my specimen sheet, I decided on this just because it is so widely recognised, i have shown the font in 60, 72 and 84pt sizes using the regular font, then in 72pt. size i have done the shaded font, black/ bold font and the steel shaded font. This shows it off in different sizes and versions for people to use.

Font Bureau WebsiteHere’s what my font would look like on the Font Bureau web-site, there are all 4 font styles there downloadable as well as a description along side of it. This looked realistic and professional and i am happy with how it has turned out.

Font Bureau Specimen Book Here is the cover for my Font

Bureau Type Specimen book, for something so simple it took me a while to design, i did a few but wern’t very happy with them them all, then while mixing and matching ideas, i put the large punctuation in and i thought it looked good, i wanted to put my font in there but wanted to use let-ters i liked and realised this would be the 4th edition, as i hadn’t done numbers with my font, i thought spelling it out would look good, Originally the “Font Bureau Type Specimen” was in white and located in the top right, i had a last minute idea to do the switching colours and thought i would test it, i liked how it looked so left it. I’m glad i didn’t rush this and go with one of my first designs becuase this turned out quite well in the end.

Font Advertisement

I had two advertisments cre-ated, both very simular, just on my way to make the sec-ond, i pasted in the bold font and it looked like a drop shadow, i liked this effect and thought about potentially keeping it, so i saved it and then continued to make the other one.

Font Advertisement

This is the second advertise-ment i created for my font, i have kept the switching colours consistant through the advertisement and Font Bureau book cover, this also meant i could show off both major font styles at the same time in one advertisement without repeating letters. I enjoyed making this and think it turned out to look re-ally good.

Marcel Breuer Final