Material Studies

This project called for you to make up your own typeface through found objects. I had many found objects like duck tape and pipe cleaners, but I decided to go with forks. I felt my creativity was best utilized through forks. After a long flowchart of words to use with this project and that would really capture the essence of forks, I came up with “Pitchfork”. I think I was very successful in this project because my letterforms are forms that could only be achieved by using forks.

Starting this process like I do with many of my other projects I try to write a page about the subject at hand. I will just write what ever comes to my mind about the topic. In this case we had to break it up into 3 sub categories. The categories I chose were sound, musicians, and instruments with my main subject being electronic music. You can view my notebook writings at this beginning of this post. From these writings I underlined words that directly related to electronic music and the subcategories, I called these key words in this beginning process. I also started listing as many instruments as I could as well as musical terms and sub genres of electronic music. This reminded me a lot of the 100 objects process that we had to do as freshmen in beginning design. The three main words I came up for Sound were Hi, Mid, & Lows. For musicians I used my own band the Nikeboyz, Beethoven, and legendary house music producer Frankie Knuckles. Lastly, for instruments I used Kick drum, white noise, and hi hats.

From here I tried to work as much on the computer as I could to become more proficient in Illustrator. I did a lot of tracing from an actual kick drum, low knobs, and Beethoven’s bust. Doing my abstracts in Illustrator also really helped me play around with shapes and the pen tool. I also did some free hand drawing, but I wasn’t too happy with these. I think this was due to the fact that I had spent so much time working on the computer. I am really glad that I did so much work in the computer before hand because it made all the next steps from combining and iterations that much easier. Combining the 3 symbols is where I started to see where I wanted to go with my symbol. Especially for my Low abstract symbol and traced Mid symbol being able to take the parts I wanted and combine them in the computer were really helpful to getting towards a final symbol I believe. 

Moving onto iterations is where I believe I spent most of my time. This is also the stage in the process where I learned the most like experimenting with line variation, stylistic shifts, reductions, and counters. I wanted to show this process so in this post I have attached many of my iterations as well as the final product. I really believe that attending the vinyl-cutting workshop really aided me in getting my symbols finalized. This is because I learned a lot about making the symbol into a true negative thru the many features that illustrator has to offer like the pathfinder window. Overall I will use many of the lessons this process taught me in other projects such as doing iterations for a lot of more work.

Constructivism

We were given four words in this project: water, air, fire, earth and we had to construct a visual representation for each of those words. I did a combination of Greek symbols for both air and earth. Then tried representing both fire and water through color and imagery. I think my most successful representation was that of the green Greek earth symbol because of the material and tone of color used.

Shape

Shape->Texture

Texture->Color

Color->Line

Line->Space

Space

Scavenger Hunt

In this exercise we had to go about finding objects that embodied a given set of words and then link them another object that embodied that word and built of it. The words we were given were: shape, texture, color, line, and space. I accomplished this in many ways from the colors to textures used.

Illustrator Exercise: Duck – Recreation

This small exercise was used to introduce us to Illustrator and more specifically the pen tool inside illustrator. It taught us how we can use the computer to make vectors of images.

Type Specimen Book – Recreation

This book was assigned to us in Typography 1 to dive down deep into a particular font and as well to get us started on designing books. I was assigned the font: Bodoni. I stuck with a CMYK theme through out my book and made it very geometrical. I achieved the project requirements by really spending a lot of time in researching Bodoni, as well as researching book making extensively.

Linotype: The Film

In this project were given a list of information that needed to go into a typographical poster. We had to design the poster in a way that showed hierarchy. I used Mondrian as an inspiration in the graphical part of the poster. However, I think I should have pushed it farther. I think if I would of done this it would have been much more interesting to the viewer. I do believe that I show a good sense of Hierarchy in the text.