Alphabet Letters

In this task we were asked to create an alphabet of our own unique design, by taking inspirations from other fonts or even attempting to try to transform letters into weird new shapes.

Recording:

When carrying out this task I was quite excited that I would get to play around with my own typography, as previously I had a dislike for it and did not know much about how much there actually was to type than just plain straight line fonts. When researching befroe my mark-making, I found several very useful books on transforming typography into different forms and shapes. This drew my inspiration towards wanting to do something that was quite unordinary. Firstly I began to list out each letter and then contort and warp it in different ways. This lead me to almost 20 different designs and scribbles for each letter, which were very difficult to choose from as some of them were very unique due to the sheer simplicity of the mark. Others however had a very funky feel to them such as those that had been crated out of shapes such as bubbles and circles, and squares and triangles. Looking back at my studies on mathematics I found that I wanted to crate something that would be mathematical related, so that it could have a very geometric and clever feel to it. After noting down the triangle letters in my sketchbook I began to develop them further into triangles which were purely right angled triangles. This also created a very neat 3D effect that my letters were made of a single folded piece of paper, due to how close I composed each triangle to itself.

Reflecting:

Looking back on this project and the many various attempts of letter transformation that I had tried, I found that I could have possibly gone a little bit further with some of the shapes that I created. One in particular was a letter form I had created by taking the word of how you would say the letter, and using those letters in order to create to actual letter the word was describing. However the problems with taking forward a letterform like this was that it was extremely difficult in order to create a letter that would bare resemblance to what I was trying to show. Any successful attempts had been too small for the eye to see which would have also rendered that particular design useless. In addition to this I felt that the letterforms that I had created were good enough as I had no idea that some of them would create a very cool looking folded paper effect. Also when experimenting with having a white text on a black background instead of vice versa, I found that it wasn't very effective to try and enhance the paper effect. If I were to do this project again I would take small squares and place them in the right angles of each triangle so that it would be apparent what particular type of triangle made up the letter. However If i had done this on the exisiting letters they would be too small to see.

Contextualising:

When llooking at contextual inspirations, some works on fonts appearances to animals from the somerset house gallery had been slightly influencial. However I found that the most helpfuil inspirations in this project were those from books regarding transforming letters and making them look like other objects, however no artists were mentioned in these therefore I was not able to make an very big contextual reference in this project to the typography.