Alphabet soup.

For this brief 'alphabet soup' I have to design a set, series or sequence of ten letterforms that communicate the word 'vanish'. Each letter has to be A6. 

To start off with we got into our blog groups and added our collections of letters together that we found over the summer as part of the summer brief. 

We then had to choose one letter that we found interesting to work with. We needed ten ways of categorising this letter so we could look at the variety of styles of this one letter. Our ten ways were: serif, sans serif, italic, bold, hand rendered, computer rendered, contemporary, traditional, point size and decorative. 

This task was part of the research for when we started to explore our word and so that we could understand the ins and outs of typography more. 

As a starting point for my word I brainstormed ideas for things like how I want my letters to look, how I can visually communicate the word I have been given and people I could gain inspiration from. 

As a starting point I looked at different fonts I could use that suited my word. I found that depending on the idea I had some fonts were more suited than others. My first idea was string, the idea was that throughout the ten frames the 'S' would slowly lose its shape. 

My second idea was to use a media where I could gradually take some of it away throughout the ten frames. I feel out of the pencil and the glitter idea, glitter worked best because not only did it look better but with pencil it never completely vanishes. The third idea was a less literal interpretation of the word vanish, the idea is that the letter would fall and eventually vanish off the final frame. 

For the third idea I chose a very decorative font because throughout ten frames I would slowly make the letter vanish which meant I would need more to work with. Instead of just taking parts of the letter away I replaced this with glue, this is because I felt it made the idea look more interesting. The forth idea was another example of how I could make the letter disappear. To start with i tried a hand rendered approach but this didn't work because the ink had soaked through the paper so i tried it with printed letters and it was a lot more successful. 

The sixth idea was based on the fact that if you blow a balloon up and carry on, eventually it would have to pop. I chose 'S' because it can be quite a bubbly font. It would gradually get bigger until it 'vanished'. For my final idea I looked at making the letter disappear by covering it. Throughout the ten frames i'd gradually colour the background in until the letter was gone. 

From doing all of these experiments I could then choose my favourite idea. 

My final piece. 

How to...

This is from my first brief 'HOW TO...' which is a five people group brief where we were looking at the problems student face when they first begin university. As part of this brief we have to design something to solve one of these problems for students. For our initial research we wrote down some of the problems we have faced as new students so far. 

Out of all the ideas we came up with we then narrowed it down to just five. These five ideas were then taken down by a tutor for each group in the class and then we had to choose one from a hat. After doing so the idea we had to work with was weather conditions in Leeds. 

We composed a list of everything that is weather related so we could start to develop ideas. 

We then came up with our 'problem' and 'solution'. Our problem was the fact that students who are new to Leeds aren't familiar with the weather conditions and we came up with the solution of creating something that showed students how to create essentials for the weather conditions using household equipment. We then looked at our list of weather related things and separated this into two different seasons, winter and summer.

This is where we began looking at different ways we could inform students on how to survive the weather conditions. We chose three from this list that we thought were most appropriate to our idea. 

We wrote what we intended to do for each of these three ideas and then another group of students looked at each of these ideas and decided what they thought we be best for us then to go on to produce. 

For our final pieces we will design four posters, two for summer and two for winter. As there was four of us we decided to design a poster each. I chose yoghurt aftersun and here i have mapped out my ideas for what will go on my poster and how it is going to look. These ideas were shared with the group so each poster contained the same type of information. From this i could then design my final piece. 

The final piece I designed for the series. 

The four final posters. 

Personal Alphabet.

This is the alphabet i created that visually represents me.

My brief was centred more around my personality rather than things i like. I've used colour around the edge only so the centre of the letter is kept white to represent the fact Im a neat and organised person. The colour around the edge represents the fact I have a vibrant personality. I've also used a rounded font because i feel this is more positive. The whole idea is also quite simple to show that Im not too much of a complicated person.