OUGD403 SELF EVALUATION

Alphabet Soup; Typeface, Final Presentation

On Friday we were split into group crits with our partner to share our final typefaces, and to talk about everyone's work. I was surprised with excellent quality of work which everybody had produced, i think its a brilliant start to the year, and it was really inspiring. Joe who had produced an alphabet to represent me had produced some brilliant work, i think he'd really took the fundamentals of my personality and managed to chisel away at it until he'd produced a font which i thought fit me really well. I was really pleased with the finished version of my typeface, i believed it portrayed the two halves of Joe really well, whether it be in his music or his interest in graffiti. I was asked about maybe colouring in the letters, not leaving them as just a stroke, and maybe trying lowercase letters, i have taken note of this and may try out the different options at a later date.

Alphabet Soup; Typeface: Group Progress Crit

On Friday we were split into groups of six and had to present the progress of our brief to Amber and Simon. I was given some feedback and it was really helpful to get the view of my work from my peers. Here are three points which were mentioned during the crit.

One problem was that i was making my letters look to much like graffiti, they had too much detail. I was told to keep my design a bit more simple, this way it would look neater and professional.

My design consists of two fonts mixed together, i was told to try experiment with other fonts not just helvetica and brushscript std. I believe if i try other fonts i might find that two other fonts fit much better with each other!

I'm on track and i have some good ideas which i can develop and produce into my final design i just need to keep experimenting. The two fonts which i have at the moment work very well together and even without adding elements of graffiti they already have a street-art kind of style.

Alphabet Soup: Group Crit

We had a group crit on the Alphabet soup task we had finished. We were put into groups and told to neatly categories and stick our letters onto the wall by our group. After completing this task the groups all swapped table and we had to critically take one letter down at a time, explaining and defining why we had taken that specific letter off of the wall. After 15 minutes we had 5 left on the wall, we then had to pick whos letter we thought was the most interesting and innovative.  My letter was left on the wall in which we'd moved from so i was quite happy about that.

Evaluation; Alphabet Soup: Visual Thinking

My thoughts on the process of the Brief?

I started looking at the melting of food and materials such as plastic and metal. As I researched more into the word i realised there wasn't a lot of diversity, the way in which something melts is the same for almost any material. I started to look at Molten Lava and the way in wich it over laps and leaves big blobs of cooling lava behind, and also created an interested pattern. I liked how my letters were unstructured so i could create whatever melted pattern i wanted around a letter, although i wasnt aloud to lose to much form for it then to become just a messy blob. I thought visually my final outcome was really good, i'd worked on capturing the right flow of the blobs so it all conjoined and looked neat and professional.

The concept behind creating the letters was pretty simple, once i had mastered how to draw melting droplets. The thing which was hard was trying to make it look different to any other slimy font. I believe i took it from an angle which was quite contemporary and not to cliché.

What Worked and What Didn't?

I believe using tracing paper and the light box to get my designed type onto the paper i wanted was a really fast technique, rather than drawing straight from hand! And also talking to me peers for ideas which may inspire me was a good way to get started.

I believe one thing which didn't go so well was the initial start, looking for the research. It was easy enough finding a picture of food or a material which had melted, but it was hard to get the right shapes in which i could immitate to show the speed of the liquidified material dripping down the edge of the letters. I settled on picking out similar ways and forms in which the food or material would drip down a plate of food, then sketching this onto a traced letter.

What woukd you do next time?

From getting ideas from other students with the same word i think i'd incorporate illustration into my letters. One girl had drawn a lot of her letters as a 3D object actually melting, and drawn food to show one way in which something could melt. I think i focused to much on keeping the form of the letter at a readable level than actually represting the form of melting.