Fonts

Fonts 

This week in the workshops I tried creating my own font. Inspired by a series works by artists such as Punk studio: Electricity, Josef Muller Brockmann and Lauri Rosenwald I came up with a few basic ideas for fonts.

Idea #1

I was inspired by the punk studio electricity piece and thought about what it must look like from above at night. This inspired me to start exploring using light trails from cars as a way of expressing each letter.

I thought about different road layouts such as motorways, roundabouts and raised roads. I also looked at different ways of expressing these, for example, the letter A is very basic, E has street lamps at various points as well as the red and blue of a siren, P experiments with what the road may look like with no streetlamps replacing the white with a dull grey and finally S looks at negative space and bold colours.

While I liked it, I felt that it could be a bit too unrealistic as a font as each letter must be cursive to flow like a road would. Additionally, I felt that it needed much more development. 

Idea #2

The second idea for fonts that I had was a more simplified style of different buildings found in and around cities. I drew my initial ideas freehand before revisiting them after the workshop to create them digitally.

I liked the idea of this font but ultimately decided to develop my third design.

Idea #3

I chose to develop my final idea into a full alphabet. I thought about the cityscape design 'Punk Studio- Electricity' and the highrise buildings. I used this idea to create a basic template for each letter.

Here are my hand-drawn experiments.

The yellow and white blocks are meant to represent offices with lights on whereas grey blocks are those that have their lights off. I experimented with the ratios of coloured blocks as well as how those blocks translated to letters. After the workshop, I went away and created these letters digitally.

I decided that it was this font which I wanted to develop as I liked the structure of the high-rise design.