Typography - Task 3: Type Design & Communication
30.05.2023 - 27.06.2023 / Week 09 - Week 13
Ilhan Rayan bin Khairul Anwar / 0361205
Typography / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media
Task 3 - Type Design & Communication
Ilhan Rayan bin Khairul Anwar / 0361205
Typography / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media
Task 3 - Type Design & Communication
LECTURES
Refer to Task 1
INSTRUCTIONS
TASK 3 / Type Design & Communication
We were tasked with using four writing utensils and one unorthodox tool to
create five different typefaces using each tool. Once we experimented with
them, we would then select our best five for review and our lecturer Mr.
Vinod would select the best one.
Sketches
Originally I wanted to use an boxcutter as my unorthodox tool, however as I
started thinking about it realistically, the sharpness of it would cut
through the paper and make it difficult to write with, especially since I
was using ink for the tool. So instead I opted to use a pair of scissors as
I had much better control and was less likely to damage the paper as well.
For the experimentation phase, we were required to draw three vertical
lines, three horizontal lines, three circles, and the letters A, O, T, M,
and X in their capital form. Below is my first sketch that I made in class when we were given the
assignment.
Figure 1.1: In Class Sketch, Week 7 (16/5/23)
Figure 1.2: Five Experiments, Week 8 (23/5/23)
.HEIC)
Figure 1.3: Five Best Designs, Week 8 (23/5/23)
Figure 1.4: Five Experiments Redone, Week 8 (25/5/23)
.HEIC)
Figure 1.5: Five Best Designs Redone, Week 8 (26/5/23)
After submitting this again for review during our independent study week, Mr.
Vinod selected my third design again (4.0 Pen) and I moved on from there to my
digitisation process. But before I started working on that, I decided to write
the selected alphabet over and over again in order to gain practice with the
style and from all of the letters that I wrote, I would then select the
designs that I found the best and use them.
.HEIC)
Figure 1.6: AETKGRIYMPN Written 5 Times, Week 9 (30/5/23)
.HEIC)
Figure 1.7: AETKGRIYMPN Written 10 Times, Week 9 (30/5/23)
Digitisation
After I uploaded Figures 1.6 and 1.7 onto Adobe Illustrator, I created another
layer and used the brush tool to create stars on the letters that I liked and
found were the best designed, after looking at my starred designs, I picked
the best ones and I screenshot them and placed them into the grey rectangles
that I made to give me a general idea of the size of my letters.
Figure 2.1: Letter Selection, Week 9 (30/5/23)
Figure 2.2: Letters in Place, Week 9 (30/5/23)
Once I had all of the letters in place, I hid all of them except for the
letter "A" and starting working on my digitisation process. We were given two
different ways to recreate the letters in Illustrator, either we use the brush
tool to redraw the letters or use the shape tool to create basic outlines and
perfect them using the pen tool and the curvature tool. I chose to use the
shape tool as it provided me with much more precision with my digitisation
process.
Figure 2.3: Letters "A" Digitisation Process, Week 9 (30/5/23)
The way I performed my digitisation was simple, I would first create a basic
outline using rectangles and lower their opacity to either 50% or 75% so that
I could see my handwritten letter behind it. From there, I would use the
curvature tool to alter those basic shapes and recreate the letter.
Figure 2.4: All Letters Digitised, Week 10 (5/6/23)
After I had recreated each of the letters I uploaded them to Facebook for Mr.
Vinod to review it, only for him to use it as an example in front of the class
on what not to do as he explained that there was little to no consistency with
my digitised letters, as seen with the vertical strokes. He also explained
that with handwritten letters, imperfection is fine since we don't have much
control but with digitisation, we have to introduce control to our letters and
ensure that they retain consistency, control and repetition with the strokes.
What I had was an accurate translation rather than an accurate font. After
taking in this information, I went back and utilised the letter "T" as my base
since I liked the shape of the vertical and horizontal stroke in it. Using
those strokes, I refined each of the letters and made sure that there was much
more consistency in the strokes.
Figure 2.5: Refined Letters, Week 10 (5/6/23)
Before I started working on FontLab, we had to create four punctuation marks
to accompany our letters; those four punctuation marks being the period, the
comma, the exclamation mark and the hashtag. My process for creating them was
simple, I would reuse elements from my other letters and recreate the
punctuation marks using said elements so that I would keep the consistency
that he told us about.
Figure 2.6: Punctuation Marks, Week 11 (11/6/23)
Figure 2.7: Font Finalised Design, Week 11 (12/6/23)
FontLab 7
Once I had refined my letters, I started moving them into FontLab 7 by copy
and pasting them. One piece of advice that we were given so that our
transferal process would be much easier was to move the origin to the bottom
left of our letter so that when we pasted it into FontLab, it would appear
within the appropriate space and not somewhere else on the map.
Figure 3.1: Letter "A" in FontLab, Week 11 (12/6/23)
Something interesting to note, to my surprise I didn't encounter many issues
when I was pasting all of my letters into FontLab as many of my fellow
classmates and friends encountered many issues when pasting, such as the
counter space being filled in whenever they pasted their letters into Fontlab.
I would say that I was lucky but it may have been due to the fact that I never
used the circle shape when digitising my letters and used only the rectangle
shape. As seen in the figure below, I only ever used the rectangle shape and
would then curve them into place from there.
Figure 3.2: Rough Creation of Letters, Week 11 (12/6/23)
One issue that I had encountered when transferring my work onto Fontlab was
that some of letters had a small open space inside them most likely due to the
way I built my letters. Rather than having them be flat against each other
whenever they connected, I would have some parts go underneath another part so
that I could retain certain curves. As seen in the figure below, which comes
from my letter G, there was a small pocket due to the two shapes most likely
deleting each other from overlapping. I solved this simply by removed a lot of
the nodes and flattening the two surfaces together in order to fix the
mistake.
Figure 3.3: Open Space in the Letter "G", Week 11 (12/6/23)
After I solved this issue that appeared again in my T and N, I added in my
punctuation marks and lowered their size so that they wouldn't appear so large
when typed out.
Figure 3.4: FontLab 7 Matrix Screenshot, Week 11 (12/6/23)
Once I had uploaded my letters onto the matrix, I opened a new metrics window
and started testing out how they looked when put into an actual sentence. But
before I did that I typed them out again in order just to get an overall idea
of how the text would work.
Figure 3.4: FontLab 7 Matrix Screenshot, Week 11 (12/6/23)
After I changed the left and right kerning for the letters to 50 as per Mr.
Vinod's recommendations, I started working on altering the specific kerning
space between two letters. The process I did to create the specific kerning
for each letter was by starting with A and editing the space between the next
letter.
For example, I would do AA, then AE and EA, then AT and TA, and so-on and so forth. That way I could make sure that every combination of letters had a specific distance between each other. I did the same for the punctuation marks as well except as seen in figure below, I never gave a specific value for the space between two punctuation marks as grammatically you seldom put two punctuation marks together.
Figure 3.4: FontLab 7 Matrix Screenshot, Week 11 (13/6/23)
Once I had all of that sorted out, I started planning on what sentence I could
create for our final poster. The requirements for our poster were that it had
to be in A4, it had to use each letter once (punctuation marks are optional),
and it couldn't exceed ten words. On top of that having only half of the
alphabet at our disposal limits the phrases we would be allowed to write,
especially since two of the five vowels are missing. The main solution for
this issue was to simply use ChatGPT to generate words for us to use to give
us an idea of what kind of sentence we could make.
Figure 3.5: ChatGPT Word Generation, Week 11 (15/6/23)
After looking through what words it came up with, I eventually decided on the
phrase "EGYPTIAN KING PETER, A PRIME PIRATE KING!" I had to do it in all
capital letters since I didn't create any lowercase letters for my font. Once
I had done that I exported my font as "Thick & Thin IKA" and added it do
my font book. I created a new A4 file in Illustrator and typed out my sentence
into a poster for me to upload.
Figure 3.6: Sentence in FontLab, Week 11 (15/6/23)
Figure 3.7: Sentence in Illustrator, Week 11 (18/6/23)
After I created my poster, I didn't feel quite as satisfied as I had hoped
when I looked at the poster from a distance so I went back into FontLab and
made some small changes to my letters as well as changing the name for my font
as it felt too bland. I decided to change it to Sandscript IKA to give it a
bit more character and better name.
FINAL Task 3: Type Design & Communication
Download font here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nshU_lfryjxUr9HHE41gy7xBVJp6bXbm?usp=sharing
Figure 4.1: FontLab Screengrab, Week 12 (25/6/23)
Figure 4.2: Final Task 3A, Type Design & Communication "Sandscript"
(JPG), Week 12 (25/6/23)
Figure 4.3: Final Task 3A, Type Design & Communication "Sandscript"
(PDF), Week 12 (25/6/23)
Figure 4.4: Final Poster (JPG), Week 12 (25/6/23)
FEEDBACK
Week 8:
General Feedback: Independent Study Week
Specific Feedback: The issue with this is they all look the same. In any case, 3 is fine, however why aren't your letters sitting on the same baseline? i.e. g, y, p they don't seem to be anatomically positioned correctly.
Week 9:
General Feedback: Identify the letters that work well together as some letters are designed better than others. Minor bits in the letter can help create character and identify a letterform that doesn’t have too much character. Make sure that there isn’t too much character in the letterforms. During the digitisation process, there are some losses of the design due to technical errors. We don’t need to both uppercase and lowercase, we only need to do both. If you’re doing capital letters for your digitisation, you shouldn’t use the entire art board for the whole letter, make sure that there is space within the 1000x1000 space. As long as the changes during the digitisation process are more positive than negative, and the character isn’t lost, then it is an enhancement and is okay.
Specific Feedback: Be careful about the thickness of the letterforms as some of them are thicker than others.
Week 10:
General Feedback: If you do work the day before class, you don’t have enough time to go over it and see your mistakes. It is important to study other font designs to gain a better understanding of the concept. You can’t improve your letterforms if you don’t understand what it is that you need to improve. A clear starting point and ending point with each stroke. If you try to fix something already broken, it’ll take longer to perfect it than from starting again and redoing the creation process.
Specific Feedback: The vertical strokes that I had are too different. The variation in vertical strokes should be as little as 1 or 2. The nature of the writing is different when it comes to each letter. With handwritten letters, they are fine to be different as it is imperfect, however with digitisation you need to introduce control, consistency and repetition with the strokes. What I have is an accurate translation, not an accurate font.
Week 11:
General Feedback: Look at the link provided by Mr Vinod to make punctuations of our own, it’s a good tutorial towards making good punctuation that fit our style. A lot of the letterforms from other students are nice but they need more consistency when it comes to the strokes used. This can be tackled by making small details that add up towards the final product.
Specific Feedback: Your subheadings are too similar to the body text, making it harder to see the contrast between them. The layout images are too small and too packed together.
Week 12:
General Feedback: Look out for the kerning in your poster, make sure that the poster size is A4, be creative with your work
Specific Feedback: No Specific Feedback (Absent)
REFLECTION
Experience
I personally found this task to be the most difficult one out of the three that we did as there were a lot more steps for this project compared to the other two in my opinion. First we had to start off by drawing, then we had to perfect our style, then we had to digitise and perfect it there again before moving it to FontLab 7 and finalising everything; even after all that we still had to create a poster for our font to be presented on. I also wish we got to at least do the whole alphabet or let us as a class choose which letters we would like to use for our font. I am somewhat looking forward to Advanced Typography since I believe we create the entire alphabet in that class which could be exciting, at the same time it means a lot more work that we'll have to do.
Observation
While working on this task, I found looking at the works of my classmates to be the most helpful as I got to see what kinds of fonts they were able to come up with and it provided me with an understanding of how far we're able to take this project as well as where our limitations are set.
Findings
What I learned from this task was that a lot more work goes into the actual design process for typeface creation, especially when it comes to the artistic side of things. There are a lot of minor things that artists have to focus on and examine in order to make something good. I for one did not focus on a lot of the minor things which is why I feel that my work isn't as great as my classmates, but I am satisfied with what I have.
FURTHER READINGS
Figure 5.1: Typographic Design: Form and Communication 6th Edition (2015)
This was the book that Mr. Vinod highly suggested we read throughout the semester, I stated in my Task 1 that I planned on reading it but I ended up not using it that much for the semester. I decided to read through some of it for this one to help me.
Figure 5.2: Letterforms Analyzed: The parts of a letterform (Page 33)
Figure 5.2: Typographic Design Process: Inspiration (Page 241)
After I received my feedback for my original five experimentations (Figure 1.2), I decided to read a bit on how artists gained inspiration for their typeface and I was surprised to see how much real life could influence the design process for a typeface and how Ned Drew was able to build upon that. While I never applied this to me revised experimentations (Figure 1.5), I do plan on following this train of thought for next semester in Advanced Typography.
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