I realized that the word that I was using only used five letters of the alphabet and so I needed to make a sixth. I thought that the letter ‘e’ would be fairly easy to make and would fit with the style that I was going with.
I made the lowercase e by removing parts of the lowercase c and adding parts. For the uppercase E, I added similar serifs to the end of the letter so it would match up with the rest of the letters that I had already created.
After receiving some feedback from Mike, I booked out a graphics tablet from media loans to transfer my hand drawn type to the computer. I did this as my attempts to do this via scanning did not look the way I wanted to. I found it easier with the graphics tablet as it would smooth out the line that I had drawn.
I used the tablet by tracing over my hand drawn letters. The lowercase version of this worked well and fitted well within the page. I had a bit of a problem tracing in the uppercase version as it did not fit on the page. I managed to work around this though.
I played around with brush styles and sizes to find the best one. I liked 5pt flat brush but when transferred to Adobe Photoshop it didn’t join up very well and some parts were too thin so they did not stand out against a background very well. I changed to 3pt oval brush which I think worked a lot better as it is more thick and so stands out better. I also deleted anchor points and moved paths around to create a smoother line.
I then put the diamonds on in black and in red. I did this so that when it came to putting on the backgrounds in Photoshop, I could see which one would stand out better. For example, I thought about using red and white stripes associated with the circus as the background, so the red diamonds would not work as well as they would blend in with the red stripes, therefore I decided to create black ones as well.
To edit my font on the computer and to make it digital, as well as to fulfil the brief by making a PSD mockup, I needed to put my font into Adobe Illustrator and then into Adobe Photoshop.
I started by scanning in the drawings of my typeface and then opening them within Adobe Illustrator. I then followed the instructions from the post on ‘creating your own handwritten font’ which I made a post on earlier.
I made the background a dark colour so that I could easily see where the white parts were that I needed to get rid of. I found this particularly difficult as, where I had hand drawn it, some of the lines did not quite join up and so it made it harder in Illustrator.
I was not happy with this, although it was only my first attempt, as I thought that it looked messy and very unprofessional and was not at all how I wanted it to look. For next time I would not draw on the diamonds but would add them later on as I think that they do not look very good and look unclear.
My first thought when I did the initial design of my typeface was that it reminded me greatly of playing cards, and the suits – hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds. I, therefore, decided to look into playing cards, the designs they use, as well as the suits and the shapes used.
Most English-language deck of cards use either the same serif font or, less commonly, the same sans serif font.
I was particularly interested in, somehow, incorporating the symbols of the suits into my typeface. Originally, I had used the diamonds as a cut out in the thick stroke of each letter. I decided to play around with the positioning of the symbol more, as I felt that, although the diamond works in that place the other symbols are more complicated and so might require more space, otherwise they may look squashed.
Below is an image of a couple of designs that I came up with to figure out where I could place the suit symbols:
I feel that the first and the last ‘C’, where the suit symbol is inside the thick stroke are too squashed and you cannot clearly see what is inside it. For example, the clubs and the spades symbol is fairly similar and when it is written in a small size they look very similar. I also think that as spades and clubs are a black suit there is less colour to the type and so it would look less like a cut out and just like part of the letter which I do not want.
The other three, in my opinion, work better as they have more space and you can clearly see which suit is which, however I am still not happy with a) the colour of the clubs and the spades as I think that it would be too much black and I would like to add a little bit of colour to my typeface, and b) I don’t feel that it would look good in a font as a whole as I am not sure where I would place the suit symbol in letter that are not rounded and don’t have a centre bit.
I decided to focus mainly on trying to design the letter ‘A’, ‘J’, ‘K’ and ‘Q’, for ‘ace’, ‘jack’/’joker’, ‘king’ and ‘queen’. I thought that if I use these designs I would scan these main letters into the computer and use vectors to create my font in Adobe Illustrator and then place it on to a playing card so my product would be a deck of cards. These are my main four letters:
I think that they need some work done to them as I am still not sure on the serifs on the letters and the overall shape of the ‘K’ but I think that they are in a good place to start.
I would still like to test out the idea of using the diamond shape in the letters, and maybe inside the curved letters as I think that this idea looked quite good in my first attempt and I would like to see where this could go.
In a workshop I learnt how to successfully create a typeface that can be used on a computer using vectors. I did this by scanning in a design that I had done the week before that I was fairly happy with. I chose this font to scan in:
Once scanned in, I opened up the file in Adobe Illustrator and traced the image on. To get rid of the white spaces in between the letter ‘e’, I changed the background colour so it stood out more and then deleted the white area inside it. I had then vectorised my font.
From there I smoothed the edges of the font out so they were not bumpy or anything and flowed nicely. This took a long time until I was sort of happy with my font. I was not entirely happy as there were still a few bumps in places that I did not want them to be and it wasn’t quite as smooth but I was still happy with the results. I could then move the letters around and place them wherever I wanted. When hand drawing this font I had joined the ‘ine’ together to create a calligraphy/script style font. As I had done this I could not move them around separately which I now know for next time.
My vectored font