Type Design

Recently I brought the book 'Creative Workshop' by David Sherwin, which has 80 challenges to test and sharpen you designs skills as well as helping you create work for your own personal portfolio. The main feature I like about the book is that is give you a time limit to complete the challenge meaning you are working against the clock to finish the task. The most recent challenge I undertook as Easy as ABC where you had to create each letter of the alphabet with any objects that you could find which at the end to the challenge meant you created your own typeface.

Before I got stuck into this task I decide to undertake in some research about typefaces. I found out that a typeface is a style of letters, numerals and punctuation, these are normally grouped in families. For example a typeface would be Helvetica whilst the font is regular, light, italic and bold. Type design is when you design and create a typeface. A typeface used to be measured by points.

The structure of the typeface is the 'graphic element' which builds the typeface to be different.  There are two types of stroke, this is the straight such as 'k, l, x' which can be horizontal or diagonal and the rounded such as 'c, o, s' which can be open or closed. Instroke and outstroke are terms that typographer used, instroke is when the you are writing the letter it started at the top like 'c, f' whilst outstroke is when you have to take the pen off the paper at the bottom of the letter such as 'g, j, y'.

Here is some more terminology that I found out whilst doing my research;

• Stem is a vertical stroke such as the 'm' has three stems.
• Spine is a centre stoke like an 's'.
• Ascender is a stem that is normally is higher than the x height such as 'l, b, d, h'.
• Descender is a stem that is lower than the baseline such as 'q, p, y, g'.
• Arch is when a letter has an arch like an 'n'.
• Bowl is a rounded stroke such as a 'p'.
• Tail is a trailing outstroke such as 'y'.
• Bar is a horizontal stroke such as 't'.
• Arm this is a horizontal stroke that is either at the top or bottom of a letter such as 'T'.
• Loop tail is a bottom of a loop such as a 'g'.
• Ear is a short stroke on the top such as a 'i'.
• Apices is an angled stoker at the top such as 'w' which has one apices.
• Vertices is an angled stoker at the bottom such as a 'v'

After my research I had an hour to now think of what object I wanted to represent each letter and how it would look. I decided that I wanted the background to be plain and the colour black so I used some black card that I had lying around my house to create the backdrop. Then I focused on the lettering being an object that I use everyday and was important to me. At first I choose to use my headphones but this proved to hard to get the wire stay in the place and you couldn't see the what letter it was. I then came up with the idea of using pencils as they are an important tool that I use to design all my work. The pencils looked great against the backdrop so I start taking the picture of the individual letter.

I am extremely pleased on how professional it looked and has inspired me to create my own typeface when I am next creating a poster as I feel it stands out. Below is a close up of one of the letters and the whole alphabet I created.

'G' 

Pencil Alphabet