Typography Projects

January to the end of February, we've been undergoing a module full of type projects.

Project 0: Video

Every year throughout this whole module, there's an introduction to After Effects for first-years, wherein all the students are given a few lines from a song, and are asked to animate them with type, then they're all spliced together as one presentable video. Last year it was a Bob Dylan song, but this year it's Rapper's Delight, by The Sugar Hill Gang. I only got two lines, compared to pretty much everyone else, who got about four or five: You can check out my part here.

Also, I'd been using After Effects longer than anyone I knew in the group, so after seeing a work-in-progress of what was going on so far, I volunteered to create the introduction, since it was 30 seconds of what would be just black space. You can watch the intro here (in a touch lower quality), in which I employ a good few of Disney's basic principles of animation, as well as a few advanced After Effects techniques (audio keyframes and parentage, as well as some expressions work).

Project 1: Monograms

This project would've been a whole lot better, if I already hadn't designed myself a monogram back in October (see back in the Portfolio page, under Miscellaneous items). I still got a good grasp of putting together a couple of decent monograms for my initials, though. I'd have used the October one if my lecturers hadn't have seen it already.

Here's the two. You can see working sheets for each monogram here, and here.

Project 2: Compositions

Here, we were given a list of proverbs, sayings, etc, and asked to create a typographical composition for three of them. I've just picked out my top three here.

"A big fish in a small pond"
"A sledgehammer to crack a nut"
"A chain is only as strong as its weakest link"

Project 3: Document

After spending a couple of days researching 20 basic typographical terms, we were told to create an innovative document to display the information. We spent the rest of the day folding paper, before everyone went 'Meh, this sucks', and we all decided on doing something a lot more interesting. I began to work on bookmarks, which turned into a set of bookmarks, which turned into a set of Pantone colour swatches, which could also double as bookmarks.

The gridlines and margin layout that is common to all the designs. The swatches are 265mm x 60mm, with doubled 5mm margins & large areas cut off for the pivot, giving me an effective working area for information of 200mm x 50mm. You can hopefully see the structure when looking closely at this individual swatch. This was the first major InDesign project this year.

This image just shows the orientation and colour. this is an image showing the entire set (three swatches still have descriptions and illustrations to complete). Also, I began to create a small video to demonstrate motions, which was incidentally the first time I worked out how to use several compositions in After Effects, inside a single composition, much like you'd use Movie Clip symbols in a Flash movie.

Project 4: Hero

Everyone was given a certain type-user/designer to research, and then create/come up with an idea that relates to their work. I was given (from a list of around 50) Josef Müller-Brockmann, a big name in Swiss design of the mid 1900s; a constructivist. It was nothing short of perfect, all his posters were awesome, and incredibly good to see how they're done as well. After creating a required mood board for the research week, I cracked on at recreating 12 of his most illustrative posters in vector format (via Illustrator). These were then arranged into circular compositions to be made as pin-badges (38mm in width).

As well as the badges, I also created a quick packaging layout with InDesign, and a photo-mockup to show that they're actually badges.

Project 5: Book Cover

Final module project, three weeks: design a book cover (front, spine, back) for any book of your choice. Mine is a fictitious fiction book, which I'm sure breaks some sort of sense laws, but it's a book nonetheless.

A nice idea borne from a bunch of spy clichè ideas. My original idea involved using cats in some way, either illustrated using spy equipment, or a photomontage of cats looking out of windows. I'd just bought a book full of images from a charity shop, I didn't want to waste it.