I had been struggling to come up with ideas for a little while and then found an image of a singer from a band I like that has an interesting tattoo which uses negative space. I found this concept particularly interesting as at first glance it looks as though he just has unusual shapes tattooed on his forearm but at closer inspection you can decipher the phrase ‘carpe noctem‘. Below is an image of the actual tattoo as well as a close up, drawn out version so you can see it clearly.

I liked the idea of using the negative space in and around the letters as a way of creating a font rather than with the actual letters themselves. I had a few goes at attempting to write out a few words using this method, while drawing in the letters to make it obvious what the letters are and the shapes of them.

I found a few logistical problems with this idea. To make this font work, the letters have to be, or I think it looks best, when the letters are formed using straight lines with no curves. This creates some problems when writing out certain letters, as the letter ‘O’ and ‘D’ look fairly similar when written one with straight edges. I cannot use the same way of writing the two letters as there would be no way of differentiating between them so I would have to come up with two separate ways of writing each letter or find a way of forming the letter that would make it obviously different. You can see in the example above of the word ‘London’, that when the letters are not drawn in for clarity, the ‘O’ and the ‘D’ are very difficult to distinguish.

I do like the idea of using negative space but I feel that it would be very difficult to create a working font from it as many letters are very similar looking. Also, I am not sure what purpose the font would be used for, other than headers.