Tuesday, 4 November 2014

Alphabet Soup Initial Ideas - (OUGD403)

Alphabet Soup

After creating a conclusion that my typeface is Times Roman I was given a new brief that was linked with my powerpoint. After being given a random generated word by my teacher Simon we decided to go into further detail. The word that I was generated was Peaceful.  My initial starting point was to research the word peaceful.

I came up with the following definitions to describe peaceful:
- Pleasure
- Free
- Steady
- Joy
- Happy
- Bloodless
- Agreement
- Friendly
- Gentle
- Quiet
- Loving
And many more. (Image below)

Before starting my initial ideas I decided to look more into church typography.  Throughout my research I found out that a lot of writing consists of handwritten script which consists of lots of serifs, swirls and varied strokes. I then decided to look at some outdoor church signs that invite you in. From this research I noticed that a lot of the body type was in fact sans serif and very minimal.

1. 


I then decided to look into charities such as Green Peace and Unicef. One that grabbed my attention was Unicef who help children survive their early childhood. It works around 190 countries providing water, health and basic needs. I had a look at their logo which is very powerful and moving. The logo consists of someone holding a baby up to the air within the image of a globe. 3The typeface used is Univers Light which is easily legible from a distance. The type is sans serif and makes it clear and looks peaceful to me. 
From here I decided that I was going to use both serif and sans serif for my initial ideas and hope that from my crit that I would be able to further my original initial ideas. Throughout my initial ideas I kept using 'www.signsforchurches.co.uk/userfiles/churches30.jpg, http://signsforchurches.co.uk/13/Bespoke-Church-Notice-Boards.html' as my reference to keep inspired. 

Here are my initial ideas (the requirement was at least 10)


The first sheet is of my rough research before starting my initial ideas. I wanted to see a different directions of the word peaceful and how it can be interpreted.



I then started by drawing the initials times typeface and simplifying it so that each letter would have a different stroke that would have a different weight. The second letter to the top right was based on taking each stroke and making it as minimal as possible. I also tried to remove a part of the letters stroke to make it more straightforward and plain. 


Here are two letters that I thought didn't go as well but I think its important to signify mistakes to show that your identifying mistakes and making adjustments. The second letter in the image is one that I tried to make peaceful by adjusting the serifs to have a slight curve. 


Here is another sheet of initial ideas. I think the ones that work are the ones that are in black. I think they look most peaceful and have subtle difference in them. Personally my initial goal was to get better with calligraphy as it was my main aim to produce a letter in a calligraphic style. The last two letters are attempts using swirls and loops to create a friendly approach towards peace. 


The last design sheet is one that I thought looked most peaceful consisting of most of the words I researched. I thought it was simple, gentle and quiet which all linked back to the word peaceful. The one that I thought worked best was the one with the arrow pointing towards it. It has varied strokes and it looks balanced. 





1. http://www.trustiseverything.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/church-sign.jpg
2. http://www.yourworldview.org.uk/news-events/482/unicef-shorts
3. http://fontmeme.com/unicef-font/


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