Advanced Typography - Task 3: Type Exploration and Application

11.10.2023 - 29.11.2023 / Week 07 - Week 14
Ilhan Rayan bin Khairul Anwar / 0361205
Advanced Typography / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media
Task 3 - Type Exploration and Application

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LECTURES 

Link to Lecture Notes

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INSTRUCTIONS

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PRACTICAL

Task 3: Type Exploration and Application

For Task 3, we were given a choice of three options for our final project which required for us to create a typeface that solves a problem in an area of our interest. Our typeface had to consist of all uppercase letters, all lowercase letters, all numerals and the punctuation marks on our keyboard. Our three options for our final project were as follows:

1. Create a font that is intended to solve a larger problem or meant to be part of a solution in the area of your interest be it graphic design, animation, new media or entertainment design or any other related area not necessarily reflecting your specialisation. 

or

2. Explore the use of an existing letterform in an area of interest, understand its existing relationship, identify areas that could be improved upon, explore possible solutions or combinations that may add value to the existing letterform / lettering. 

or

3. Experiment. For your idea to qualify as an experiment it must be novel and unique — working with material that might be 3-Dimensional, digitally augmented, edible, unusual, typographic music video or fine art.

Part 1: Ideation 

Figure 1.1: Proposal, Week 9 (24/10/23)

For my final project, I decided to go with option 2 which was to explore the use of an existing font and improve upon it. In my case, I'm taking a font used in a 2002 video game and modernising it so it suited the modern age. For context, in 2002, Arc System Works released the video game "Guilty Gear XX" and with it, 25 playable characters each with their own distinct typeface that suited their character. Nearly twenty years later, when they released their latest game "Guilty Gear -Strive-" they omitted the custom typefaces for each of the characters in favour of a singular typeface for all of them.

I've decided to take it upon myself to attempt to bring back the custom character typeface, specifically for the character of "Testament," who is one of my personal favourite characters in the franchise and appeared in both the 2002 and 2021 releases, sporting a brand new redesign in the latter. I'm going to take different elements from Testament's new design and apply them to my typeface so that it would reflect the character.

I was originally planning to create a lyric video using the character's theme song to present the font however I was advised that if I were to do so, the focus of the video would have to be on the font rather than the footage itself, which made me reconsider the lyric video idea.

Figure 1.2: Old Testament VS New Testament design comparison, Week 9 (24/10/23)

Figure 1.3: First Ideas, Week 9 (24/10/23)

To start off, I decided to try and recreate the original 2002 typeface to get an understanding of how it looks and what elements I can improve upon. Additionally I took elements from Testaments new design that I would use in the new typeface, the main two being the inscriptions on the side of the scythe as well as the cross-like symbols on their gloves.

Figure 1.4: Typeface Recreation, Week 9 (24/10/23)

After trying to recreate the typeface on my iPad, I decided to do it in Adobe Illustrator where I could more easily create shapes and edit them compared to Procreate. One of the main features of the typeface that I decided to keep in my new typeface is the serifs as I felt I could do something interesting with them and put my own spin on the design. 

The way I designed and built my letters is fairly simple, I start out with very basic shapes to create the outline, then I carved them into looking more inline with the actual letter, from there I refined them to fit the shape better until it looked like how I wanted it. I applied this technique later on for my own typeface while making sure that the principles were adapted to the new design.

Figure 1.5: Blackletter Inspiration, Week 9 (28/10/23)

Because Testament's new design is more gothic and elegant, I decided to use blackletter as my main font of inspiration for the design and one element that I noticed with these kinds of fonts is the use of having both thick and thin strokes. 

Part 2: Font Creation

Figure 2.1: Canvas with Grid, Week 10 (30/10/23)

I started by creating an artboard for all of my letters that was 1000x8000 pt in order that I then copy and pasted so that I would have space for all of the glyphs that I would be making.

Figure 2.2: Artboard Guide, Week 10 (30/10/23)

From there I created guidelines as well as descriptors that would act as reminders for where specific parts of the font go. Though once I started working on the lowercase letters later on I would alter this layout so that I could have space for the letters that went below the baseline.

Figure 2.3: Artboard Reference, Week 10 (30/10/23)

I added in the original six letters that I had recreated into the new art board so that I could use them as a reference for the letters I could work on first as well as helping me build the rest of the alphabet from there.

Figure 2.4: Original Serif Designs, Week 10 (30/10/23)

Figure 2.5: Scythe Engravings, Week 10 (30/10/23)

My plan for the serifs was to have three different designs that I would use based on the thickness of the letter's stem, if it were thin it'd use the design on the left, if it was thick it'd use the middle design and the right design was for the lowercase letters. I drew inspiration for these designs based on the engravings on the side of the Testament's scythe, which I recreated so I could take it apart.

Figure 2.6: First Letter Designs, Week 10 (30/10/23)

Using a separate art board that I had made, I started coming up with ideas for how I could start designing my letters and what consistent elements I would want to have in my glyphs. I used the same method I had for my first design where I started off with blocky shapes before carving them into the letters.

Figure 2.7: First 11 Letters Developed, Week 10 (31/10/23)

The letters seen in Figure 2.7 are the first designs that I had made for my letters and they were quite rough when compared to how they look now. I wanted to keep the umbrella-like shape from the original T as I thought that it would work well with the design. I did these letters first as I could reuse elements from previous letters to make this, though I was saving the more circular letters for last as I was stuck on how to design them. I tried basing the S on the original design from the 2002 typeface however as I continued my development of the typeface it felt out of place which ended up in it being redesigned.

Figure 2.8: Cross Design Inspiration, Week 10 (31/10/23)

The cross-like designs seen in Figure 2.7 for letters like K, E, and F are another element from Testament's new design that I used in the creation of my font as I liked the way it looked and I felt that I could put it to interesting use for some letters.

Figure 2.9: First Capital Alphabet, Week 10 (31/10/23)

As seen in Figure 2.9, this was my first draft for what I wanted my typeface to look like. Looking back I can admit that my work here was pretty bad, especially with letters that had a lot more curvature to them like O, Q, S, U, and D. To my surprise my B ended up looking near perfect. The sharp swoopy elements on letters like X, Y, M, and N were meant to be a representation of the character's scythe, albeit not as effective as the letters B, Q, and R which carried that effect much more effectively in my opinion. Once I was done with designing the capital letters, I started working on designing the lowercase letters.

Figure 2.10: Uppercase & Lowercase Letters, Week 10 (31/10/23)

Mr. Vinod advised us to design our lowercase letters next to our uppercase letters to see how they looked side-by-side, but because of the way I designed my art boards it was a bit difficult to do so. So what I did was I made space for the lowercase letter and designed it next to their capital counterpart, once I was done designing it I would move it to a separate art board that would be for only the lowercase letters.

Figure 2.11: Most of the lowercase letters, Week 10 (31/10/23)

However when Mr. Vinod came to look at my work, he informed me that a lot of the elements weren't working well together, stating that the serifs should all be the same, there are quite a few inconsistent elements with the letters and that the lowercase letters should still have the exact same thickness and thinness as the uppercase letters. 

Figure 2.12: Calligraphic Brush, Week 11 (8/11/23)

Mr. Vinod showed me that to have a more consistent look with my letters, I should create a brush for the pen that would help create the thick and thin lines for the letters so that I could more effectively create my letters. From there I started redoing a lot of my letters so that they would look consistent.

Figure 2.13: Full Project File Screenshot, Week 11 (8/11/23)

While my art board looks quite messy, I used this method to move the older versions of letters so that I could make space for the newer ones.

Figure 2.14: Evolution of the letter "G," Week 11 (8/11/23) 

Figure 2.15: Completed Typeface glyphs, Week 12 (13/11/23)

After quite some time of making changes and constantly redoing my work, I finally completed the glyphs for my font including all of the punctuations and numerals. I mainly reused assets from my previous letters so that there would be consistency in my work. Now that my font is done being designed I moved onto transferring everything onto FontLab 8.

To my surprise much, I didn't encounter many issues with uploading all of my fonts onto FontLab 8, all of my letters retained their same size and didn't disappear whenever I pasted them into the application. The main problem that I would have with FontLab 8 is dealing with the kerning for all the letters, but luckily I had a plan.

Figure 3.1: FontLab 8 Screengrab, Week 12 (14/11/23)

My plan to handle the kerning for all the letters in order to make them look less awkward next to each other was to type out three letters, like "AAA" for example and look at the kerning for the middle letter and how it looked compared to the letters to the left and right of it, from there I would replace the middle letter with the following letter in the alphabet, in this case "B." I would then repeat this process until I reached "AZA." Once there I would change the left and right letters to the next letter in the alphabet, which would lead to "BAB." I repeated this process for three hours with all the uppercase and lowercase letters. 

Figure 3.2: FontLab 8 AAA Screenshot, Week 12 (14/11/23)

Figure 3.3: FontLab 8 ABA Screenshot, Week 12 (14/11/23)

After I was done with configuring all the kerning, I would type out random sentences that came to my head just to see how it looked in a full sentence. Once I was satisfied with how it all looked together I exported both a .ttf and .otf file, the former for my laptop and the latter for my iPad should I want to experiment on there as well. As for the name of the font I decided to call it "New Testament (IKA)," since the design is meant to be a new version of the previous Testament typeface while the (IKA) at the end is my trademark since we were advised last semester to have one.

Part 3: Application

After exporting my font, I began thinking about how I was going to do my font presentation and application. I decided that I would start with designing a "title page" of sorts that serve as the beginning of my font presentation.

Figure 4.1: Artboards, Week 13 (20/11/23)

I started off by creating these ten art boards since we were told to do between 4-5 pieces of artwork for both the application and presentation. I was advised to use the font presentations of previous students to inspire me for what I could do for my presentation as Mr. Vinod provided us a folder with their previous works for us to look at. After spending some time previewing previous pieces of work, I decided that I would have an "introductory" page where I would have my name, font name, a sentence showcasing the font as well as an illustration in the background.

Figure 4.2: First Presentation Inspiration, Week 13 (20/11/23)

Figure 4.3: First Font Presentation Artwork, Week 13 (20/11/23)

I decided to use art of the character as the background art to emphasise on the theme that I drew inspiration from them for my font. I, of course, credited the artist in one of the corners of the art work as I am not skilled enough to be able to create high quality pieces of art of the character on my own.

Figure 4.4: Second Presentation Inspiration, Week 13 (20/11/23)

Figure 4.5: Second Font Presentation Artwork, Week 13 (20/11/23)

The second artwork that I decided to do was to have one where I showcased both the uppercase and lowercase letters through quotes and sentences akin to the one seen in Figure 4.4, which was also a previous student's work. Later on when Mr. Vinod saw my work for both Figure 4.3 and 4.5, he stated that the artwork takes too much attention away from the font which should be the main focus of the presentation. So I duplicated them to save my progress and started working on an alternate background. I decided to reuse the cross design that I had made based off of the cross shapes on Testament's outfit, though this time I decided to draw inspiration from another separate redesign for the character as I really liked the way their version of the cross looked. This still technically counts as the same character so using elements from a different design for them would still be fine as it matched the theme the 2021 design had. 

Figure 4.6: New Cross Design + Reference, Week 13 (22/11/23)

Figure 4.7: First Two Artworks Redesigned, Week 13 (22/11/23)

When I presented the new redesign to Mr. Vinod, he asked me to increase the brightness of the red for the crosses which I applied to the final versions of my font presentations and applications once I was done.

Figure 4.8: Font Explanation, Week 13 (21/11/23)

One of the original ways I was going to present my font was through a description page where I would explain the backstory behind the font's creation in order to showcase the font being used in writing as seen in Figure 4.8. However when I presented this idea to Mr. Vinod he said it would be better if I wrote this in my portfolio instead rather than for the presentation.

Figure 4.7: Testament Recreation using quotes, Week 13 (21/11/23)

Another idea that I originally wanted to do was to create an outline of Testament using quotes and lines of dialogue from the game using the font that I created. I spent a while on this before presenting it to Mr. Vinod and being told that it would not work at all, so I scrapped this design and moved on.

Figure 4.8: Numeral Presentation, Week 13 (22/11/23)

In place of the outline artwork in Figure 4.7, I decided to present the numerals that I had made since I noticed I barely used them at all. I was originally going to make a numpad design but I realised it would look awkward to just have the 0 be all alone at the bottom, additionally I needed a background for the artwork so I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I would do a 3x3 grid with the numbers and have the 0 act as the background which not only solved my first two issues but would also make for a cool looking art piece.

Figure 4.9: DRAW Checkered Board, Week 13 (20/11/23)

One of my first ideas that made the cut was this art work where I presented the letters of the word "DRAW," since I felt that the letters had the most contrast between each other when compared to other words like "WINS" or "LOSS." The theme that I was going for here were the words that the in-game announcer would say after the end of a match, stating if the round ended in a win, loss, or a draw. 

Figure 4.10: GLYPHS Artwork, Week 13, (21/11/23)

The last font presentation that I had was a GLYPHS board where I showcased all of the glyphs that I had made for the font. Once I was satisfied with my work for the presentations, I moved onto working on the applications.

My original plan was to do collaterals similar to what I did in Task 2B, those being a T-Shirt, a Concert Ticket, a Vinyl, and a new fourth collateral since a business card wouldn't work that well.

Figure 5.1: Updated Concert Ticket, Week 13 (21/11/23)

My original plan was to update the concert ticket with my new font and basically re-use it, but as I thought about it the idea was terrible and I knew I could do something much better so I scrapped this idea completely. I decided to work on the Vinyl record first since that would be the easiest so to speak, I didn't want to use the same vinyl that I used for Task 2B so I found a completely different vinyl cover that would work well for my idea.

Figure 5.2: Vinyl Cover Reference Image, Week 13 (23/11/23)

Using this as a reference for my vinyl, I started working on creating my own version.

Figure 5.3: Two Vinyl Designs, Week 13 (23/11/23)

I came up with two designs, the one on the left in Figure 5.3 being my first design which reused an old concept that I had in mind but eventually scrapped since the image dominated the artwork, rather than the font. I knew I wanted a black background but for the vinyl I did of experimenting and found out on Procreate that I could simple drop in colours onto the areas that I wanted and it would change the image, so I used this to create my own custom vinyl record easily and it looks cool as well. The one on the right is my revised design which I also eventually scrapped as the cross in the centre dominated the piece rather than the font. Instead, I moved the cross to the background and brought the text to the centre so that it would be the main focus instead, the design can be seen in Figure 6.7.

Figure 5.4: Two Book Cover Designs, Week 13 (23/11/23)

In place of the name card, I decided to make a book cover instead as I thought I could create something interesting for the cover. My original plan was to have all of my collateral applications use the same name for their title, that being "The New Testament" which was the name of my font. However looking at the design it felt a bit too sacrilegious because of the whole Old Testament & New Testament thing with Christianity so I decided to change the name. I decided to use the name "Calamity One" as that was one of the lines that Testament would say in-game whenever they used their "Overdrive" which is basically their ultimate move. I was also told by my friend that I should add test to the spines of the books so that it didn't look so empty.

Figure 5.5: Two Shirt Designs, Week 13 (23/11/23)

Next I moved onto designing the Shirt applications which I thought were going to be fairly easy, however as I progressed in their development I noticed that it wasn't working out at all. The design was dominating the design and I was struggling to come up with a way to have the font be the main focus without an additional graphical element. Additionally, having to stretch and bend the text so that it looked more natural became tedious so in the end I scrapped this idea as a whole.

After doing a bit of research and asking ChatGPT for what products utilise blackletter fonts, I found that one of the more common uses of blackletter fonts in real world products comes from alcoholic beverages so I decided to design the label using my font.

Figure 5.6: Mead Bottle Design, Week 13 (23/11/23)

I decided to go with mead as my alcoholic beverage of choice as I thought it would be an interesting choice over more common things like beer. I did do a bit of research on what mead bottles look like and found that they can come in cans or bottles which I found interesting, while researching I also looked at the contents that they had on their cover which I noted down and added onto my own design. I chose the name "Unholy Diver" as that is one of Testament's special moves in the game and it sounded great as an alcohol name.

Figure 5.7: TESTAMENT Design, Week 13 (23/11/23)

For my next application I decided to be a bit creative and decided to recreate the original Testament typeface design using my new font. I started off by typing out the word and added a white outline to it before using the shape tool to create a rectangle behind it and adding in a black & red gradient to match the original design. From there I used the pen and curvature tools to carve out the rectangle and made an approximate recreation of the original design which can be seen in Figure 6.6.

 
Figure 5.8: Testament NES Game Cover, Week 13 (23/11/23)

For my last application, I decided to create a game cover based off of old NES cartridge covers using a pixelated version of an art piece that I found of the character. But as I thought about it I realised that a Playstation 2 cover would work better instead since the game the original typeface of the character came out on that system.

Figure 5.9: Updated Game Cover, Week 13 (23/11/23)

I was originally going to use a PNG of the Playstation 2 bar at the top of Figure 5.9 but as I developed it further, I realised it didn't look that nice so I made it from scratch. I looked for the same font online and rebuilt the black bar at the top so that it would fit nicely in my art piece. 

Figure 5.10: Updated Game Cover Design, Week 13 (23/11/23)

Once that was done, I added in additional elements such as the font, the cross and the guide rating in the corner since every game has one. In the final version of this art piece, I increased the opacity of the cross since it's barely noticeable in Figure 5.10.

Figure 5.11: FAITH Poster, Week 13 (23/11/23)

Because of how dark the red elements were on my font presentations and applications, I decided to use the red from the poster of another video game called "Faith: The Unholy Trinity" as I really liked it's black and red colour palette, though the red I did use for the final versions isn't as bright as the poster.

FINAL Font Presentation & Application

Download Font Here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hX-ho0Qjzc7MrNBIG5MEvHzlGA-c8Eqb/view?usp=sharing

Figure 6.1: Font Presentation 1 Final (JPG), Week 13 (22/11/23)

Figure 6.2: Font Presentation 2 Final (JPG), Week 13 (22/11/23)

Figure 6.3: Font Numeral Presentation Final (JPG), Week 13 (22/11/23)

Figure 6.4: Font DRAW Presentation Final (JPG), Week 13 (22/11/23)

Figure 6.5: Font Glyphs Presentation Final (JPG), Week 13 (22/11/23)

Figure 6.6: Font Application - 2002 Typeface Recreation Final (JPG), Week 13 (22/11/23)

Figure 6.7: Font Application - Album Final (JPG), Week 13 (22/11/23)

Figure 6.8: Font Application - Book Cover Final (JPG), Week 13 (22/11/23)

Figure 6.9: Font Application - Mead Bottle Final (JPG), Week 13 (22/11/23)

Figure 6.10: Font Application - Video Game Cover Final (JPG), Week 13 (22/11/23)

Figure 6.11: Font Presentations & Applications (PDF), Week 13 (22/11/23)

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FEEDBACK

Week 8 Independent Learning Week

Week 9 General Feedback: If I want to create a font that is a homage to something, we need to accurately depict it and we need to develop a font similar to it with similar characteristics but doesn’t have any visual similarity to them. Specific Feedback: My idea is good however creating a lyric video may not be the best choice as I should have the focus be on the font, rather than the visuals being supported by the font.

Week 10 General Feedback: None Specific Feedback: I have too many anchor points on my letters which can make things much more difficult. The letters look too forced and unnatural. Letters are built around the letter O.

Week 11 General Feedback: When developing the lowercase letters, be sure to develop them next to the uppercase version to see how they work with one-another. Specific Feedback: The thick and thin strokes should still be the exact same as the capital letters. The Serifs should still be the same as the capital letters and shouldn't have their own individual design.

Week 12 General Feedback: None Specific Feedback: None

Week 13 General Feedback: None Specific Feedback: Font Presentation needs the most work, I need to change the background so that they’re all different. Remove the explanation page and separate it from my font presentation, put the in the explanation not with the presentation.

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REFLECTION

Experience

Overall I found this task to be the most fun despite how tedious it became at certain points, especially when I had to almost redo most of my work because of the way in which I designed my letters. Besides that I really enjoyed working on this task and seeing everything come together in the end and create a typeface that I'm very satisfied with was gratifying. I especially enjoyed working on the font application and presentation area as I had a lot of ways envision on how I could format and showcase my work, though most of the ones I really liked got shot down but I'm fine since the ones I do have are pretty good. I'm always happy whenever I get to do work based on something I genuinely enjoy and having my final project be based off of my comfort character made this task a lot easier for me to do.

Observation

I found the designing of the anatomy of each of the letters to be one of the most tedious aspects of this whole task as I didn't know most of the process involved with font creation. Such as how the letter "O" is used to determine the widths of a lot of the letters. 

Findings

At the end of everything I came to realise how much I enjoy the presentation and application aspect of this whole task as it was probably one of the more creatively free areas of this task. To my surprise I actually found this to be much more entertaining and enjoyable to work on compared to collaterals that we had to do in Task 2B which is interesting. Maybe it's because we weren't limited to only using our word mark for our applications when compared to the applications here which allowed for us to use both our font and additional elements in our work. 

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FURTHER READING

Sample Font Presentations

While I'm not sure if this counts towards the further reading, I'm going to include it here since this helped me a lot with the production of my font presentations. Mr. Vinod provided us with a folder containing font presentations from previous students from Graphic Design I believe as their work was a lot more detailed and had a lot more effort put into it. Seeing how they came up with their presentations in such creative ways was a bit eye opening and showed me the possibilities of what I could do with my work.