Studio Brief 2 - Alphabet Soup Illustrator

Studio Brief 2 has been set and we are to choose one of the final 10 manipulated letters from studio brief 1 and produce an alphabet based on that letterform. The final digital outcome will be printed in black and supported by visual investigation and development. The final alphabet will be printed on A2, and placed within a 4 x 7 grid. 

I will use elements learned from the illustrator workshops within this project to produce an advanced and professional looking typeface.

This is the letter I have chosen to base my alphabet on. The reason I chose this is because the outline of the letter is clearer than the others, whereas the other manipulations I carried out had materials scattered around the outside. The reason why my manipulations were varied and experimental is because the word I had to respond to is 'surface', therefore I explored the use of materials as they are they all have their own textures and surfaces.

The letter I had chosen had been created by using stencils of the letter 'G'. I sprinkled grated white chalk inside the stencil of the outside G, of which is the G from the font Clarendon Black. Before placing the grated chalk down, I glued the inside of the stencil so the chalk would stick onto the black card it was placed on. I also placed another stencil of the G from regular Garamond inside the Clarendon G, this was done to leave the Garamond letter without any chalk inside. I had placed Garamond within another font because the word I was given to respond to was 'surface'. I responded to this word by visually representing Garamond to appear as another font on the 'surface'.

The process of digitally manipulating the letter, firstly involved using photoshop's wand tool. Above I have selected a part of the white chalk from the scanned in image with the wand tool. I then selected the tab 'select' and clicked on 'similar'. This then enabled the wand to pick everything else similar to the white chalk piece selected.

Chalk Selected with wand tool.

I then turned the highlighted chalk details into a path and exported the paths to illustrator.

Paths from photoshop created with the wand, opened in illustrator. 

The first issue I came across when digitally manipulating letters, was how to place the details of the chalk inside the letters for Clarendon Black. I decided that it would be best to copy and paste the details of the chalk, from the initial G, to make a big enough area that would allow every letter to fit inside. I then had to arrange the area of chalk and the letter, to appear at the front of the layers, in order for the clipping mask to work. The letter had to be above the chalk details for it too work properly also.

Creating a clipping mask.

The Result.

Once I had filled in all the letters from Clarendon Black with the details of the chalk, I had to fit the remaining Garamond letters within the typeface. This involved creating outlines on Garamond and moving the anchors of the letters, for them to be able to fit within Clarendon. I had to make sure that they were legible and had enough space around them to be read clearly. I opened a new file in illustrator and typed out both fonts in the same size. Clarendon Black was bigger even at the same point size because it was a thick font, with a big line weight. This is why it was chosen in the first place, because it was big enough to fit Garamond inside. I overlapped the letters and made Clarendon blue so it was easy to see where I had to fit Garamond in. Different anatomical elements from Garamond had to be rearranged or deleted for it to be placed inside Clarendon Black.