The best laid plans…
Here are my pieces corresponding to May 16, 17 and 18. Following theAlphabet series, I present you the letters “L”, “M”, and “N”…
Category: vector
Continuing my tour of typefaces through the alphabet, here are my pieces corresponding to J and K.
Not really bowled over with this piece, but I reached my time limit, so here we are.
In case an apology needs to be made
I promised myself I wasn’t going to use helvetica for this. That said, I didn’t set out to the typeface I ended up using.
How did this happen?
I started looking at the different looks of each “h” typeface, and I noticed how much hobo’s “h” looked like a piece of a wishbone. I started scaling and placing and rotating, and the wishbone ended up becoming more of a spiral pattern. From there I arrived at what we have here. Total time: less than 10 minutes.
I learned two things working on this “g” piece. 1) I have a really sucky selection of “g” fonts on my Windows machine. And 2) I really like the double storey “g” over its single storey brethren. I also scoured the interwebs trying to find out why this letter changes from double to single as you travel to the heavier weights in Gill Sans (one of the quirks in this family that puzzles me), but came up empty. Guess there are some things that us humans aren’t meant to know.
So, long story short. I decided on Glasgow because I liked how the negative space played with the positive to give me the impression of crop circles. Simple as that. The color used is the same color (in various tints and transparencies) as on Scotland’s flag.
Foiled again!
The lack of variety in my “f” fonts on my PC was pretty surprising. Don’t get me wrong. There are some sturdy workhorses there– stuff like Futura, Folio, Franklin Gothic. Just not a whole lot of visual variety. So I turned to yet another of those free fonts that I’ve collected over time but that have very little practical use. Kinda like that pair of banana yellow socks I had back in the 80s.
When I looked at FlutedGermanica’s lowercase “f”, I was struck with how much it looked to me like a flint-lock pistol. I took part of an illustration I made for a proposed version of a logo for my church’s youth group, and, inspired by some noir and noir-ish film imagery, I put this together. Hope you’re enjoying– as am I– this romp through the alphabet.
I just realized that I could have done something to belatedly commemorate here one of my best friend’s birthdays– oh well, hindsight being 20/20 and all that.
“e” is for Eurostile
Today we’re looking at the letter “e”. I saw Eurostile’s lowercase “e” and it reminded of some of those unwieldy, heavy door handles/pulls that you see in hotels and restaurants. So I played around in Illustrator with textures and stuff (which, I should point out, almost came close to bringing my 10+ year-old computer running CS3 to a grinding halt). Anyway, this was the result of roughly 20 minutes (or so) worth of work.
For some reason, my “d” font choices are somewhat limited on my PC, which is my main workhorse, so I had to look at things a bit differently. I picked this font– which I’m Ivory soap sure is one of those free fonts that some (a lot?) of us have accumulated over the years. Its use is fairly limited at best, but when I started looking at the letters and their shapes, I kept seeing red, so I used that vibe as a starting point.
Picking which font NOT to focus on for the letter “c” was easy. I knew from the get-go I didn’t want to go with the much-maligned Comic Sans. Not because I didn’t like the font (which, being a “recovering” comic book geek, I don’t particularly care for anyway). It just didn’t move me creatively for this project. I looked at Copperplate– arguably another in the long line of the overused, and the seed for this image crystallized itself rather quickly.
So, this is what I got for today. No fancy intros, no purple-prosed laden explanations.
(And, yes, I’m well aware there might be some irony at play tonight).
Enjoy!