Making my font digital

Posted on November 14, 2015 by Jess Claxton

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.

Negative space

Posted on October 17, 2015 by Jess Claxton

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.

‘Hnoy’

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Jess Claxton

During the workshop we learnt how to hand draw our own fonts and started doing this by copying an already existing font on the computer. I found this incredibly difficult and my hand drawn effort did not look anything like the original, in my opinion.

From there I then attempted to start some rough designs for my own font. I was struggling for ideas so I decided to write out my name in a similar kind of font to the one I had chosen above, although the ‘s’ became sans serif. I don’t think this design was terrible but was definitely not something that I wanted to pursue.

I then looked at trying to design a more calligraphy/handwritten style font.

I preferred this design to the previous one as I felt it had more style than the other and was more interesting to look at. Also, all the letters followed the same ideas, whereas in the one above some letters were serif while others were sans serif. I liked the idea of using ways of writing letter that are not commonly used, for example the ‘s’ above, rather than the conventional way of writing it, and I think that this may be something that I use for my final design.

Again, I attempted a handwritten, cursive style font (below). I am quite proud of this design, although I think that is nothing special, as again all the letters flow together.

The last design that I created using this method used fairly unconventional letter shapes, slightly inspired by my own handwriting.

This is my favourite design out the ones above. I like the idea of filling in the open spaces inside letters, for example colouring in the ‘g’ and the ‘d’ completely. I particularly liked the ‘g’ and the shape that it makes and think that this may be something that I will try to replicate in any further designs. I also liked how the unusual way of writing the ‘e’ made the font look and as said above, I think that the uncommon way writing certain letters is something that I will look into.

Initial Research

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Jess Claxton

My initial research involved looking at fonts from different typography sites just to get a few rough ideas. I was mainly looking at different styles of fonts such as handwritten, retro/vintage, typewriter and stencil, although there were some others I did find interesting. I am particularly interested in handwritten and script style fonts, as you can see from my ‘Typography around Lincoln‘ post, although I do not know whether this is something that I want to do in my work or whether I will branch out and design a different style font altogether.

Below are a few images of fonts that I liked while doing my research:

These were found on the site creativebloq.com