This weeks practical drawing process and production session focused on the generation of physically produced typography. We was told that this would span across the rest of out process and production workshops, focusing on a different task each week. This week my task was to transcribe shapes into letter forms, either upper or lower case. I began by joining shapes together using a curved edge and in separate parts, this was so that I could understand the construction of the shape, knowing where each part of the text formed. The letter this created was a J and looked somewhat mechanical, like the binding bridge between the wheels on a old steam train. With this in mind I created a few other shapes that used the same process.
I then wanted to explore using simple geometric shapes to explore how together they could create a letter. At this point I wasn't to bother about lower and upper case letter, my main priority was to understand how letter forms constructed. I used a group of circles to produce the letter I. However, I didn't think that these circles should join as this would be to predicable. However this created the complication that the letter I would look much different that its intended form. I decided that to help produce the idea of the letter eye, I would then with the traditional head of a lowercase eye, add some other circles to resemble a pupil and iris, giving a more visual representative of the letter eye. This can also be seen with Dingbat letter forms.
An Example Of Dingbat Letter Forms
I then looked at producing a few more compressed letter form, forming shapes within a boundary or touching each other. For example the letter S would commonly be much taller on a standard font, however I shortened this letter by removing unnecessary parts of the letter, but retaining its iconic state. I understood that this was a very relevant factor to creating a good typeface.
