The main objective for this brief was to design and develop a new character for a typeface of your choice. This could be on a large or small scale, with no language barriers and it had to work in grayscale.
Initially myself and Danielle began looking at slang/text talk used in everyday life, such as 'lol'. We drew out a variety of initial designs but we eventually came to the conclusion that these particular designs were too much like symbols, rather than ligatures. Please refer to fig1 below.
fig1.We then chose to move on and look at 'ft', meaning 'featuring', usually found in the middle of song names when listing the artists. With this being a small, short abbreviation, we thought we could combine the two letters into one ligature. We began by creating a variety of initial ideas (see fig2 below).
fig2.We decided that simply tightening the kerning and making the F closer to the T was too obvious so we decided to go with a more unique approach, using the crossbar from the F as the top of the T too.
I particularly really liked this idea so we chose to develop and refine it by placing it on a grid and playing around with spacing. This allowed us to see it in a more linear sense and meant we could experiment with calculated spacing (see fig3 below).
fig3.One issue that did arise is that we didn't think it would work as well in a serif or script font. I began playing around with different styles of writing it, and experimented by repeatedly drawing out our chosen ligature in my own handwriting. I found that this made the ligature less effective as it lost its initial boldness and wasn't as striking (see fig4 below).
fig4.Following this discovery, we chose to go back to basics and work with our very first original ideas - placing the F and T very close together. After some discussion, we decided to try removing the crossbar to create a unique style, and we thought it looked particularly effective. After our group crit, we received feedback that this design in particular was the most effective so this became our chosen final design. The feedback was to try it in a serif font, so we did this afterwards as some extra experimentation as well as a bold, script and regular style (see fig5 below).
fig5.
Left: fig6. demonstrating final design vectorised in Illustrator.
This particular task made me think about ways in which type and text can be adapted and what effect this has on certain words and meanings. This will definitely be useful in future projects and I can refer back to the exploration from this brief. To improve my future work, I would like to spend more time developing initial ideas as this would give me a better choice of options to take forward.
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