Typography: Task 3 - Type Design & Communication

16.05.2023 - 06.06.2023 (Week 7 - Week 13)

Vanessa Kei Kurniadi / 0360525 / Bachelor or Design in Creative Media
Typography
Task 3 (Type Design & Communication)

Contents:

- Lectures

- Task 2 / Typographic Exploration & Communication:

- Feedbacks

- Reflections

- Further Reading

Lectures

Full lecture summary in Task 1

Instructions

Task 2 / Typographic Exploration & Communication

In this task we were instructed to design some letters. We need to deconstruct a letter style we wanna go with and then created our own. We will first use a traditional tool with 1 angle stroke to create the letter, then proceed to digitalize it.

0. Letter Dissection/Diconstruction
Before doing this task, I have to do some deconstruction of some letters to see the details of each shape from the letters. I was instructed to choose 1 font from the given 10 fonts, and one outside of it.

I am going to design just the uppercase letter, but I will also dissect lowercase letter to study them.

From the 10 given fonts, I've chosen to do the deconstruction of Univers Lt Std 55 Roman

Fig 0.1 Deconstruction of letters "p", "A", "R", "t" from Univers lt std 55 roman (Week 7)

Outside the 10 given fonts, I decided to choose the font called Quicksand from Fontshare. I used the semibold one, since I feel it would be the closest to my style.

Fig 0.2 Deconstruction of letters "P", "A", "r", "t" from Quicksand Semibold (Week 7)

1. Making the Letters.
On the first week we brought 5 different tools to write on paper. Some of them are tools that aren't usually used for writing. I brought:

A Zebra PM-1 Mild Highlighter
Snowman Permanent Marker
STA Metallic Brush
Artline Drawing Pen
Standard AE7 0.5 Ballpoint Pen

During class, we tried out hands-on making some letters using the tools while maintaining the same angle every time to make the strokes consistent.

Here's what I made during the session (the order are as mentioned above):

Fig 1.1 Letter design practice I did during class with the tools (Week 7)

As expected, there's not much things I can do with the permanent marker, the drawing pen, and the ballpoint pen. On the contrary, I had a lot of fun trying out my hands on the strokes of the brush pen. Not only do I have to control the angle of the brush, but I also have to control my movement and pressure to create the desired results. The results themselves are far from perfect, but I am proud of what I managed to make.

2. Practising the Letters
On week 8, it is independent learning week. We are instructed to keep practising with the tools. Mr Vinod also gave us homework to try out 5 methods on each of the 5 tools, then choose our favourite one from each tool.

I am unsatisfied with the limitation of what I can make with the drawing pen and ballpoint pen. So I changed the tools and practice with them. the tools I chose in the end were:

A Zebra PM-1 Mild Highlighter (same as before)
Artline Decorite Water-based Pigment Ink Brush
STA Metallic Brush (Same as before)
Snowman Permanent Marker (Same as before)
2.0 Mechanical Pencil

I tried to make 5 methods Here's what I made from them:

Fig 2.1 All 25 results from using different tools and angles to make the letters (Week 8)

After some lettering and practicing, I decided that these 5 are my favorite:

Fig 2.2 My 5 Favorite Results (Week 8)

We submit it to Mr Vinod and he asked me which one is my favorite. I personally like result no. 2,3, and 5. Mr Vinod then told me to go with no.2, which is the Artline Decorite Water-based Pigment Ink Brush. Next we are told to keep practicing, and then design the letters that we are going to digitalize

Fig 2.3My work for the letter A,E,T,G,R,I,Y,M,N (Week 9)

3. Digitalization

In the next class, we are shown how to make our digitalization process. We are told to choose 1 particular design that we like, and then digitalize it in Adobe Illustrator. I've chosen my letters based on how "neat" and "pretty" they are. I personally really it when my writing is simple yet neat. So I looked for the ones with the best controls and the one that looks the best in my opinion. Here's what I chose:

Fig 1.5 The one with the "✓" symbol is the one I chose for the digitalization process (Week 9)

Fig 3.1 My first attempt on the digitalisation process (Week 9)

Details:

X Height: 450 pt

Baseline: 0

Capheight: 538

As much as I tried to make it look finer, I want to keep it "original" and make it feel like my own writing. I'm not sure if Mr Vinods will like it, but I want to try to make a font that subtly says "you might not know this but this is my handwriting". I wanna make it look like a casual imperfect font but one of my own, thus I try to use the calligraphy brush on most if not all the parts of the letters.

When we came to the next class, Mr Vinod told us that most, if not all of us are imitating the sketch we made on the graph paper. We were supposed to refine it and control every bit of the detail of the letters. Mine in particular are inconsistent in the horizontal and vertical strokes, and said to be "imitating the sketch too much".

I don't exactly know if this means "handwriting fonts" are not ideal, or if we're supposed to tweak our sketches in a specific way to make them look "finer" and maybe computer-like. I still have this question in my mind, but since I am a bit scared to make another mistake and having to redo everything again, I decided to use the middle ground.

I decided that it would be best to make it more refined. I redid the letters and made the horizontal and vertical strokes consistent. I tried to make the same thing with the horizontal lines, but they might not be in perfectly same-sized strokes. The fonts I made seem like casual sans-serif fonts with little handwriting traces. The only things that made it my own are the custom width of the strokes, and the little bumpy end on some of the words. The bumps are a bit inconsistent, though. I try to make them fit the letters well by tweaking them with the pencil tool, but I figured this little part might be allowed to be a bit different from each other to make each of them special in their own way, though I might still need to consult about this to Mr Vinods. But before that, I still need to put the letters into FontsLab first.

Fig 3.2 My second attempt on the digitalisation process (Week 10)

Details:

x- height: 450 pt

Baseline: 0

Cap height: 538

Ascenders: 556

Descenders: -21

FontsLab

In our facebook group, Mr Vinod asked us to put our letters into FontsLab, but besides the specified letters, he also asked us to put in some punctuations: . , ! # So I have to make them before I can continue to FontsLab

Fig 3.3 My final design (merged into 1 shape) plus the required punctuation in Illustrator (Week 10)

Since I made the symbols/punctuations pretty much on a whim, for, and # I copied them and used Pathfinder to merge the shapes on the copied one. These are just some countermeasures just in case I have to redo something.

I copied and pasted them into FontsLab according to the tutorials in the lecture youtube playlist that Mr Vinod gave us, and here's how they look:

Fig 3.4 My second attempt on the digitalisation process in Fontslab (Week 10)

During feedback session I was told that if I am to put the little bumpy ends, they should all face the same direction, so I made some more edits to my letters.

Fig 3.5 My Illustrator file for this task - Every step is done in a different artboard(Week 11)

Fig 3.6 Revised Final Font (Week 11)

Fig 3.7 Revised Final Font in Fontslab 8 (Week 11)

Fig 3.8 Final fonts in metric tab (Week 11)

I exported it and named it Horibrus, which is taken from "Horizontal Brush". In the end this font is called Horibrus Regular.

Final Look: Type Design & Communication

Download font here

Fig 4.1 Horibrus final font screenshot in metrics tab (Week 11)

Fig 4.2 Horibrus final font looks JPEG (Week 11)

Fig 4.3 Horibrus final font looks PDF (Week 11)

Fig 4.4 Horibrus Poster (Week 11)

Fig 4.5 Horibrus Poster PDF (Week 11)

Font Preview

Feedbacks

Week 7

No Feedback - The project just started.

Week 8

Go with design No. 2 and keep practising.

Week 9

General Feedback: Digitalized the letters you've made with the tools you've chosen. use the x-height of 500 pt. For capital letters, you can't really tell so you can only guess

Specific Feedback: Your letters are consistent, go ahead with the digitalization; 1st attempt: the letter is too big, make it smaller. It's ok if it's not exactly 500pt, but keep it around that.

Week 10

General Feedback: Most of you are imitating what you made in the sketch process with your hand. You were supposed to refine it during the digitalization. Pay attention to every detail.

Specific Feedback: Keep the strokes consistent between the vertical and horizontal lines, refrain from imitating the sketch and keep exploring.

Week 11

General Feedback: Overall better and the font is consistent.

Specific Feedback: If you want to do the little bumps at the end of the letters make sure they are facing the same direction and make a certain angle. The punctuation are still wrong. The angle of the hashtag is too extreme.

Week 12

General Feedback: Make sure you're already using all the given letters on the poster.

Specific feedback: You can explore on putting the small font name word by word here and there on the poster. You can also try to put a texture on the poster.

Reflection

Experience

This task has given me a whole different challenge. Not only I have never ever touched a font-making app in my life, nor designed one, but I also never really care about the details of the font. So this task has been an eye-opener. During the whole task, I realized just how many things we need to pay attention to. While the rules of making the letters might apply for certain font styles such as this one, the amount of details I have to focus on makes this work much harder and took more time than I expected. Even so, after I started to get the hang of things, I'm starting to enjoy more and more of the process. This font might not be my best work yet, nor a type of font that I would use on a daily basis, but I'm proud to say I did as best as I could to make this font and to tweak them to my liking.

When Mr Vinod told me twice that my letters are consistent, for some reason I was pretty happy. Maybe because I felt like I did well with the sketch and the digitalisation process, or maybe because it gives some resemblance to my character(?). I'm not sure myself, but I am proud and happy when I heard his feedback.

Observation

Seeing my peers work, I was kinda surprised and they somewhat gave me some inspiration, even though mostly I can't apply it to my current work. The other's letters are so different one to another, and I'm genuinely excited to see so many beautiful fonts created by such simple tools. Some has very curly/twirly feel to it, and some rigid. Some strokes are similar (like mine), and some has extreme difference. It's really interesting to see.

Findings

I never thought that creating a typeface is this complicated. As someone who likes comics and cute art, I've seen people turn their handwriting into sfx, make cute doodles of letters, etc. This is probably why I tried to make my letters as "handwriting-like" as possible during my first digitalization process. But I found out that there's a detailed process of thorough refinement, where I have to pay attention to a lot of details, and take control of most if not all, parts of every single letter. While it's a time-consuming experience that feels like grinding on a game, I also unexpectedly don't hate the process. It's clearly not my favourite, but I don't hate it either. On the contrary, I found myself quite enjoying it.

Of course, I also finally know how to do the steps of making a font. It felt like a long but short journey, but I'm proud and happy with what I managed to make.