Life Through a Lens
This blog consists of material and thoughts from my class Typography. It also consists of design and typographic inspiration and posts I've reblogged.
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1-log of type progress-first steps-ilovetypography notes-
Johanna Heidorn
CDM 2700 Typography
Spring 2012
LOG
ilovetypography Reading-Notes on Typeface
Beginning and designing a typeface all my own sounds exciting and intriguing. In order to start the inspirational juices flowing I began looking at hand created commercial type on shorpy.com and other websites. I looked in my environment and began looking at figures and shapes as a possible element to my font face.
Arranging the contrasts and the weights of each letter is a difficult thing to wrap your mind around. If I do this to this letter will it stand out too much and look awkward? But then again I like the look of this but this doesn’t match anything else I’ve done on the other faces.
The goal for me is go minimalist and simple. I want the font to be straightforward, readable, and elegant. The angels and direction the strokes take are difficult to nail down for in essence, they are 26 individual designs all their own.
Some inspiration came from the Art Deco era in the 1920’s and ‘30’s. The desire to go beyond the normal images I collected and create something all my own was important. Art deco is an eclectic artistic design style that began in the 1920’s and went into the WWII era. This style influenced all the design during the time including architecture, interior design industrial design, fashion and jewelry, as well as the visual arts such as painting, graphic arts and film.
At its best, art deco represented elegance, glamour, functionality and modernity. Art deco’s linear symmetry was a distinct departure from the flowing asymmetrical organic curves of its predecessor style art nouveau; it embraced influences from many different styles of the early twentieth century, including neoclassical, constructivism, cubism, modernism and futurism and drew inspiration from ancient Egyptian and Aztec forms. Art deco was purely decorative.
Art Deco is characterized by use of materials such as aluminum, stainless steel, lacquer, Bakelite, Chrome and inlaid wood. The use of stepped forms and geometric curves (unlike the sinuous, natural curves of Art Nouveau), chevron patterns, ziggurat-shapes, fountains, and the sunburst motif are typical of Art Deco. Some of these motifs were ubiquitous – for example, sunburst motifs were used in such varied contexts as women’s shoes, radiator grilles, radio and clock faces, the auditorium of the Radio City Music Hall, and the spire of the Chrysler Building.
So far figuring out the relationship to the past and the present is important. Keeping in mind of angles, direction, and the thick vs. thin will be relevant. I don’t want any particular point in any letters to swell and have more contrast in weight. I am going for an even weight all the way around and have the visual elements stick out.
Want to be able to separate the parts that make a typeface interesting from the parts that make it useful in the hope to produce both that work together and create a letter form that is useful yet beautiful.
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typeface design paper-beginning ideas and thoughts
J Heidorn
CDM 2700
Spring ‘12
Typographic Design
My inspiration for my typographic design stems from the 1920’s and 30’s era of commercial hand created elements and design. I also want to incorporate the use of some of my own thought inspired figures and elements to bring into the design.
The idea of hand produced type for commercial use is one of the main focuses of the assignment. I like the idea of a sans serif font, something that is very clean, organized, simple yet extravagate, and has a distinct personality.
I want it to be consistent enough that it won’t interrupt the reading of its content but expressive enough that you will find something unexpected in the letter forms that you wouldn’t normally come upon. I don’t want any specific letters to stand out so as to draw to much attention to it and disrupt the readability and communication of the pieces.
In order for there not to be any inconsistencies I will make adjustments to create a product pleasing to the eyes. This could mean creating the illusion that all of the letters are perfectly uniform and consistent with each other.
Focusing on guidelines, contrast, angels of stress, and terminals the layout will be thoroughly thought out before any beginning stages. Creating a good size em square and point size will be essential to the flow of type structure. Em squares are traditionally divided in a grid, which will defiantly help the structures to stay consistent and readable. To avoid optical illusions some letterforms will have to be adjusted to create the impression that they are all consistent and match.
Considered points of the construction process- arms, legs, bowls, counters, eyes, shoulders, terminals, serifs, dots and many others.
After all the appropriate preparations are made, I will begin the actual design of the glyphs. Each character will take a lot of attention to detail. Once the first faces are created I feel like it will be a little easier to get into a rhythm and get ideas for similar letters and put them together.
To create a clean and unique look to the typeface itself I got inspired by the picture above. I also looked at a lot of 1920’s style of fonts but also clothing and general aesthetic and look about the culture at the time. The idea of dancers is also an intriguing thought. The way a dancer moves and has shape and form also inspired me in thinking about the overall feel of the text itself.
Models and the way they walk also stirred up some assimilation but we will have to wait and see how these figures can aid in the creation of a beautiful design.
Right now the name I think I will be going with for my typeface design will be 1920 Ville Noire. Still a lot to go before anything is finalized.
