OUGD403 Type Development (Studio Brief Two)

To develop my typeface further, I began drawing grids around the letters I had already created to try to work out a grid style I could use, however I found this unsuccessful for my project, as each letter is quite individual with seperate slants and doesn't even use specific angles, so a grid is quite useful for designing my type.

Instead of using a grid, it will be a lot more successful for me to use measurements, which should be just as easy as using a grid, especially using the rulers on illustrator.

These weren't very helpful grids, so I decided I would creat them using Illustrator. I decided I would create the grid all on top of each other so I would only need one grid for my type. This is the grid once I had created it around the letter 'A'. I decided I wouldn't mark the diagonal lines and curves as the grid would get incredibly complex, and by the looks of it it would already be very complicated to follow.

I then created the letter 'B' and the letter 'C'. It really started to take shape, however it was very complex and I decided I would leave the grid and create it at the end once I had finished creating every letter.

I decided I would create my type by using the original font 'Futura' on Illustrator and editing it to fit my theme. These are some printscreens I have taken whilst developing my typography and letterforms. 

The whole process of developing the typography was actually quite simple once I got into the swing of things, and wasn’t too time consuming, which is why I decided I was going to create lowercase, numbers and punctuation as well. This would be good as it will give me a bigger body of work and a complete typeface, which I’m actually really looking forward to seeing. These printscreens explain how I created the letterform ‘M’. I think taking print screens of my design process was really useful to document how I went about creating the typeface, as it is quite hard to explain using just words and no imagery. 

To design my typeface, I made a grid around the original font (Futura), that would fit the new typeface. The basic rule was that the stroke thickness would increase by 25% on each stroke. I think it was really useful using the grid lines as it meant I would get the exact same slope as the original typeface, therefore it would be neat and legible. 

I then used the direct selection tool and edited the typeface so that it would then fit within the guides. The grid I created was very helpful as the selection tool would snap to the grid, and therefore it was already precise, I didn’t have to check fully. I am going to do this method for the rest of the letterforms, except the letterforms with curves, for which I will use a counter cut out from the letter and move it so it would fit in its new place, then use the direct selection tool to make the strokes neater and more slick.