Elective B Type Design 1

I've not got very far with these, mainly because of my ineptitude with Illustrator. However, I have refined and simplified the drawings in the bottom layer and tried to solve some of the relationships between sizes - the tenon saw is now closer in size and has a better relationship to the screwdriver than the original hand-saw did. I'm still not sure about the clamp...

Next step is to turn them into glyphs which I'm planning to start on Wednesday.





Seeing them at this size reminds me of a tray of chocolate tools. I used to love them as a kid!

Elective A Visual Storytelling 1

My first thought, after reading the novel, was to to create a set of posters that attempted to reveal some of the contrasts in the narrative: good/evil; sanity/insanity; health/illness; light/darkness; etc. I wanted to use typography in a very playful, intuitive manner: something that I had been already exploring on my blog, www.jamesbrookoutput.blogspot.com, and which related to my ideas of typography being a system of mark-making that could be likened to painting and drawing.

Fat Times New Roman 2

Fat Times New Roman 1

Generative Distortion

I have been distorting typefaces  through controlled iterations. This relates to the work I had done in Unit 1 on generative systems. I am interested in how far a typeface could be systematically distorted and still retain its identity and, more interestingly, how it might still communicate its ‘meaning’.



My initial visual tests distorted, in controlled iterations, different typefaces, to see what would happen if familiar faces such as Helvetica or Times Roman are thickened by adding strokes around their body or put through various filters in Photoshop. The results were both predictable and surprising: a typeface loses its identity as soon as it is altered. ‘Blurred Helvetica’ is no longer Helvetica, ‘Fat Times New Roman’ is no longer Times New Roman because all the elements that make that typeface look like that typeface – and carry its ‘meaning’ disappear (although some traces remain) as soon as it is changed. However, some of the changes that occurred were surprising: Times New Roman looks like an Egyptian slab serif when it is ‘fattened up’. More interestingly, certain words take on a ‘spiky’ appearance; this transformation, however, is not consistent with other similar typefaces: Baskerville, for example, does not behave in the same way as Times New Roman and Garamond behaves differently again.

On the advice of Paul, I researched other people who had manipulated typefaces. Caroline Fabès www.carolinefabes.com has systematically manipulated Times New Roman and Akkurat to create new glyphs that share the same number of pixels as the original typeface but re-arranges the pixels in one of four different ways. She has called her new typefaces ‘Times New Ramon’ and ‘Akkruat’ an in-joke reference to the source typefaces. Similarly, Norm (Manuel Krebs and Dimitri BruniI) have created new typefaces including Normetica (2000) and Replica (2008) that are a response not only to ideas of neutrality, looking at ‘neutral’ typefaces such as Helvetica and Univers, but also to the technology available to create typefaces.

Helvetica Blurred 2

Helvetica Blurred 1

Workspace

This is my workspace. To the left is the area where I cut and paste in the real world, to the right is the area where I cut and paste in the digital world.

Macabre note: the ashes of my dog, who died in the summer, are in a box under the desk. It's comforting, and somehow appropriate that he should still be at my feet.

Disco Helvetica

Helvetica Halftone 2