Project 1 - 2D

Coming up:
I create my own typeface out of badminton rackets, spend too much money on the photocopier and I make an A0 paper plane.

---

New year, new project.
This new topic will be working in 2D, 3D and 4D, starting in 2D for the first third. We were told to create our own font out of different objects, now I know there are different types of text, such as Body text and Display text, one of these is for properly reading, while the other is purely for being creative and making the text stand out to catch eyes while relating it to the design it is on. The font we were told to create was going to be a Display Text font, meaning it will only have to stand out well, we wouldn't have to read an entire book in the font!
Here are some examples I found of some Display text on Pinterest, and you can clearly see how well they stand out and fit with the designs, but again, you wouldn't be able to read na entire book easily in any of these typefaces.

Here are some typefaces I found made of real world objects, and I have found out that the key to a good font is that all the letters will have to link well with each other and that you need a little bit of creativity to be able to see when a letter is readable and could work well, and that would have definitely come in handy with the river example up above as you have to be able to see when a shape could be seen as a letter.

This is me attempting to create some letters out of an old set of badminton rackets that I bought over the weekend. My initial thoughts were that the rackets contain enough shapes to replicate the majority of letters, so the main part of the racket could make an O, the handles are a straight line so they could create the T,H,I and so on.

These are some photos I took of some attempts at creating letters before I start to edit them. Hopefully, you should already be able to see what these letters are supposed to be which would be a good start to the project.

I have added in all of the images of the different letters onto Photoshop and called it Shuttlecock Pro, which is ironic seeing as there are no shuttlecocks in sight. I have gone in and deleted the parts of the rackets that were sat around the outside of my letters, just so they become easier to see and read, and will also help me to turn them into an actual font as you will see shortly.

The next step to creating my font is to slowly go through and cut out each letter individually so that I am prepared when it comes to placing them all out to turn them into a usable font. The way I did all of these was either going in with the Polygonal Selection Tool and slowly cutting around the edges of my letters or going around with the Magic Wand Selection Tool if it was able to correctly select the entire letter perfectly. What I did after​ that was playing with the Levels Tool to delete all of the colour from the image. I decided not to go with just greyscale as I felt it wouldn't be as readable, so instead I just made all of the letters completely black.

This was a pretty last minute idea with the thought of creating a second font, but as you can already see, it just isn't as special as the Badminton Racket one. This one was made out of camera equipment that I took in with me that day, but I noticed that there isn't that much creativity with this as there could have been, and what I mean by that is the fact that I have just simply placed items in the shape of a letter rather than trying to find a letter within the objects. 

To add them all together, I did what I did with Shuttlecock Pro and whacked them all together in Photoshop to create Memory Neue... did you see what I did there? Memory NEUE, as in you often need a NEW memory card in your camera but I spelt it in the font way... yeah that was a bad pun but still, we have font number two!

This was our first time using Calligraphr.com so I did get a little confused but I'll go through the basics. Once you sign up for free, you can download a template for Photoshop where you simply go in and add all of your letters of your new font into each box while lining them up with the dotted lines so that they come out in the same sizes. Once all of the letters are placed in the template correctly, you just export it as an image and upload it onto Calligraphr, then once you are happy that it has successfully read all of the letters, you can download your own font after giving it a name. Who knew it could have been this easy the whole time, well this is all handy information to know for future projects.

Here it is then, this is my new font 'Shuttlecock Pro' in all its glory. Admittedly, you might not be able to tell straight away that this was made out of badminton rackets, but I think it looks pretty cool! It really is surprising satisfying to type away seeing your own font following along as you go.

This is a map of Carlisle incase you haven't already guessed, but why is it here you ask? Well, good question. One of my first ideas was to create a font out of paper maps, but sadly I was never able to get it to work as you would have lost all of the detail when making it black and white, but I had a little brainwave about using Apple Maps and playing around while trying to find letters in the way the roads are set across the city. This would link up all of the talk about being creative when trying to find a letter rather that forcing a letter out of an object.

After a long time looking down every street across the city, I was able to find plenty of resemblance to every letter in the alphabet, which I thought was pretty lucky as you wouldn't be able to find that in every town. These are just a few screenshots to show you what I was looking at and hopefully you are able to easily see letters in the images.

I have gone in on Photoshop with the Pen Tool to show off all of the letters more clearly in front of the satellite images. I have named this font 'Street View Rounded' only as on the edges they are nice and rounded, which sounds obvious as the council aren't mad enough to create completely straight roads. I do quite like this as a font, and you can whisper this but I think it may even be better than my badminton font...

Well it didn't take long before I tried creating this new font on Calligraphr. I went in with the same template from my badminton design to try and make this lovely and detailed font of roads. While they look quite cool, you may not notice straight away that they are made of roads from a map but nevertheless, I think they look really smart! I do much prefer this font to my badminton racket design, so I think I'll be going down this road from now on, pun intended.

Someone suggested that I try using Calligraphr to show the fonts with the background in too, so all the houses surrounding the roads and that, and I thought it could have worked quite well but oh my was I wrong. The 'Z' was the victim of my experiment and it really just isn't readable if I'm honest. There's nothing wrong with giving something a go, in fact I think it is better giving random thoughts a go as you never know what could come out the other side, in this case however, the result was pretty shocking but at least I know I have a pretty decent font to work with.

So the, the next part of the project has been revealed and as it turns out, we will be creating some font posters, two in fact. One of these posters will be promoting the font, so will include every letter and the actual name of the font, maybe showing off how it could be used, the other being one to explain the thought process behind creating the font, or a bit of a background check on the font. These were two designs I noticed on the brief that we were given, just thought I would drop them in as I think they look really cool and is something to go off when creating my posters. One last thing to not is that our designs will be in black and white only, so I won't be able to have the yellows and the reds that you see above, it will have to be strictly black and white.

These are some very fast and last minute thumbnail sketches in the hope that they would put a spring in my step for when we design these posters. The ideas were pretty simple but I'm intrigued to see how the look digitally.

Going back to the badminton font, I have just gone in and made some of the original letters from the images much bigger as their quality will be better than making the font bigger, then I've gone in and played around with the layout of the images and the text to try to recreate the sketches that I made this morning. Once again, I know these ideas are very simple, but they are starting to look really cool. The last two of this selection with two rackets in really catches my eyes as the composition works really well with the type above and below, so they stand out quite nicely to me for a starter.

Here I was just refining some of the designs I liked, but this time I have flipped the colours around as I thought it could make the design pop that little bit more but looking back at them, I feel like it is much harder to read the text this way round, so I will have to keep playing around with the layoutI reckon.

To give my head a break from the first poster, I have been working on my second design, the one that is about the journey to creating this font. I had a really cool image in my head of the text fitting nicely above an actual badminton court, but obviously I would have to recreate one in just black and white first and what better way to do this than using letters from my font to recreate the court? Well, as you can see above, my brilliant idea kind of turned into a dropped ice cream worth of disappointment, but we move on! 

I wondered if it was the use of my actual letters that were letting the posters stumble a bit, so I went in with the Pen Tool on Illustrator to create a vector image of someone hitting a shuttlecock, which links to the name of the font 'Shuttlecock Pro'. This was a very simple design but the white space that fits around it worked really well in my mind, so I think it works much better that my previous designs.

I officially give up with the badminton racket posters, well I may have been a little over dramatic but still, I want to go back to my map made font! I had a massive brainwave on the way home tonight, that being that the name was 'Street View', so why would I not involve a bit of street view into my designs? Well, I went through some streets until I came across this house that is down the road from me. The reason I chose this building to do something with was more because it is so generic and basic, but is makes the perfect house house if that makes sense. What was my big idea then you ask, well incase you haven't checked above, I went in and took a screenshot of this house and turned it into a vector image on Illustrator with my favourite tool; the Pen Tool. I just really like the look of a block colour building over a detailed image of the normal street view, there's just something about it!

Well now that I have got my Pen Tool obsession out of the way, it is time to turn it into part of a poster, so the basic start to this design was to whack it on a plain artboard and start playing around with the typography to go alongside. 

After just two minutes of laying the text around, it didn't feel right when it is all spread out like body text, so I have started going in to see what happens when I try joining up the letters to each other as roads don't actually just stop, they are always joined to another road. There are some ideas that resulted, so far they are looking pretty cool, there is a small hint of David Carson in these, who I researched in the last project.

I have been in and added my latest type title to the designs above the house to see what they look like. While they do look better, there still a hint of simple to them so I will have to play around that little bit more to see what I can come up with.

This is a little more like it, I'm just going as the crow flies with these, making the text bigger, moving it around, adding some shapes to it too to see what happens. I am on the right road with this, but I still think there is plenty more ideas to come.

Seeing as one of our first projects on this course was to do with Perspective, why would I not go in and mess about with the Perspective Grid Tool on Illustrator? Well, I am glad I came across this as I have been able to touch up my house design and make it more accurate in terms of perspective as it turns out I did wing it a bit too much to make it not as believable as it could have been. So then, While I was just tidying the edges, I thought about actually adding in the perspective lines into the actual design, to give the house a little more purpose and thought behind it, so you can just about see there are now some black lines that follow the Perspective Grid through to the house design behind it.

We're getting there now. Here are some more attempts at playing with the layout of the designs with the new image with the perspective lines added to it, and already I feel like they are a nice touch to the image as it fills more space and can make the meaning of the house a little more clear rather than just adding some random house to the centre of the design.

This poster was the one that describes how we created the font, so to link up both the name of the font, and the actual design of the poster, I will be adding in this sentence that says "Inspired by the roads we go down every day". This was a simple description however, I feel like it matches with the brief of the project and it links the street view image to the way the font was actually created.

Here we are then, I got into the design stride earlier and have got my poster completed. I really liked how it all looked with this black border, as it gives more focus to the poster and stands out really well from changing the black to the white in the middle. The thing that really got me liking the designs was when I added in the all important sentence in the background with a low opacity. It is absolutely massive sat there in the background, but it just works super well with the current design and I can't ask for anything more.

It wouldn't be anything of mine if I don't soon add in a mockup of my design, so here we are with a folded piece of paper showing how the design would look in the real world rather then being on the Illustrator dark grey background.

I liked the other poster so much that I wanted them to match, so here is my second poster, the one that shows off the actual font, and in similar fashion, I have made the font sit nicely in the background on a low opacity to allow the name of the font stand out really well on the top. Very simple this one, but I think it works well and means that my two posters are quite clearly part of a set.

Oops, how did these get in here, never mind, here are some more mockups showing this new poster in the real world alongside the first poster as they were part of a set. I think these look awesome I'll not lie, they stand out well which can be hard to do when working in just black and white, and they show off the font and how it was made so not much else to ask for really.

This little beauty is the uni's photocopier. If you are a creative then you should already know what's coming up. Yes, you guessed it, we will be messing about with this machine, scanning in our poster designs in weird and whacky ways to see what we can get out of it. I remember doing this a lot at college and I must have spent a fortune playing around with all of the settings to see what I could get to come out. 

The basic thing to do first with the photocopier is to go and mess about with the sheet of paper when the copier is scanning the paper, so basically just moving it around in different ways to see if it can look fairly interesting. These were what resulted after a few attempts and I think they look pretty cool, but I knew there is plenty more to mess around with.

What I noticed from the first few is that to get some proper funky and different designs from the original poster. To do this, you can print out all of the key parts to the design separately, meaning that you could in theory overlap all of the layers onto one sheet, or even add some in upside down, or just mess with the layout of them all.

First of all, ignore the bits that are red, I know that is illegal in this project, but I'll explain them at another point. What I wanted you to see first is just how many different results you can get in terms of the original poster when you start to adjust all of the different parts separately and then go back in and scan them on top of each other. I thought these just looked really cool! 

These are just the designs that I liked the most, there is a pile of about 50 more weird and whacky designs hidden out of shot but this is more just to show the sheer quantity of different designs you can get when you get stuck in, also the amount of cool things that the photocopier can do.

Out of all of the designs, these three were the ones that stood out to me the most, only as you can see the amount of random attempts that I have given to the designs. The dark and dingy elements of a couple of them turned out really well so I went with it to see what else I could add to them and while it is just a foible of the photocopiers, it looks different and interesting!

Back to red designs then and I just wanted to experiment more, so these are not to do with the project directly, these were just an attempt at what would happen if I added in one other colour and I already knew that red would be the one to play with. As you can see, these turned out nicely and can clearly show off all the different layers from the designs and can really push what happens when you make different elements stand out more.

One other thing to note is that the was a pretty special kind of photocopier at our disposal today, one that can just casually expand your design from A3 to A0, which is quite impressive!

We were told to finish off the project by showing off our now modified posters by having two A0 sheets of paper, one showing the best poster in a very big scale, then the other being double sided with both of the designs. That second sheet was to then to be folded into a zine but not just your generic booklet, it had to be folded creatively. I think you can guess where this is going from the image above but I decided to fold my A0 design into a massive paper plane because why would you not do that?! 

Here she is then, my ginormous paper plane. Why most traditional zines would be able to arrive in a little booklet, or something that you could just fit in your pocket, this might not be able to do that as it is quite large, but it is safe to say that everyone who holds or sees it will have the urge to fly it, and what better way is there to get your audience involved with the design?

To finish this part off, here was my big poster set up on the wall. I think it just looks really cool blown up to that scale. Overall, this project has been really fun and has let me be much more creative in terms of where my designs go, so just by messing about with the photocopiers, I have been able to create a really wide range of ideas that has allowed me to pick out the best bits to be shown off.