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.