Illustrator.

For this brief we have to take a letter we designed for the brief alphabet soup, re-create it using illustrator and then  create 26 variations of this one letter on an A1 sheet. The first session was about getting to know how to use the features of illustrator and how to trace shapes. 

Once I knew how everything worked I could then trace my letter so it was ready to work with. 

I then used some of the tools i'd been shown to create a few variations of this letter just so I knew what was available. Most of these letters have been created by illustrator effects so as further development I can now look at actually moving the anchor points to distort the actual letter. 

These are all the variations I created before choosing the best 26 for my final piece. 

This is my final design. I think its overall quite successful because i've used a range of techniques. I really like the fact i've placed a lighter 'R' in the middle because this breaks the whole thing up a bit. 

Below is the information I need when sending my final piece to print.

Preparing for print: 

A1: 594mm x 841mm 

Landscape orientation 13 x 2

Resolution: print - 300ppi    screen - 72ppi

Colour mode: CMYK and RGB

File format: JPEG, PNG, GIF (lossy - screen) 

TIFF, PSD, PDF, IND, Ai, EPS, PS (lossless - print) 

PDF or EPS.

Visual language sentences.

For this session we were looking at verbs, adjectives, nouns, pro nouns, subjective personal pro nouns and adverbs. We also looked at how text can be cropped down so that we are left with the most important information and it still makes sense. 

Verb - doing word.

Adjective - describing word.

Noun - naming word. 

Pro noun - name of person or place.

Subjective person pro noun - he, she, I, you, it, we, they. 

Adverb - describing word for a verb. 

We created sentences using one and more of these elements such as; The postman ran away really fast from the scary dog and Barry and his animal pals ran quickly into visual language to learn about nouns. 

This was the first piece of text we looked at, we had to crop it down to 140 characters so that all the important information was there. This was actually more difficult than i thought it would be. 

Wagner Carillho moved out of xfactor house. He checked into hotel after complaining of a smell & bad habits, only returning for vocal training. 

This was the second newspaper article we looked at, this time we had to crop the text down to 160 characters but the difference being we could use text language. 

Alex Ferguson refusing 2 talk about Rooney's future @ Man U following a breakdown in their relationship. Real Madrid director denied their interest in Rooney. 

My riddle: 

Sometimes I'm orange, sometimes I'm white, sometimes I'm red, and sometimes I'm light. What am I?

Visual language sequences.

For this session we looked at how we could create sequences using the letter 'A' in various different font styles. 

First of all we did sequences that consisted of five frames. My word for this particular one was 'expand' and when another person was asked to guess what it was they guessed incorrectly. I think this is probably because the idea could be simplified more. 

We then worked in groups to create larger sequences of twenty frames, our first one being 'rush'. We cut the letter into four or five strips so that we could place them where we wanted to make the letter look as though it was rushing from one side of the frames to the very last one. 

The second word we were given was 'skip'. When this was done everyone tried the same idea of making the letter look as though it was skipping across the page so we tried to think outside the box. (Top row of image) We decided to leave every other frame blank so that we had 'skipped' a frame. 

After doing this task I found out that the more simplistic the idea, the better it is and also that the type of typography chosen for each sequence can have an effect on its meaning. 

Alphabet soup two.

For this brief I had to design an alphabet that visually represented my partner.

As a starting point I mapped out all the things I found out about my partner that I thought were relevant and also certain characteristics I would like my font to have. I then looked up the meanings of the five words I chose to focus on that relate to my partner and also found some fonts I felt were appropriate.

Here I exploring various ideas I felt visually represented my partner, I used the fonts I had found previously and manipulated them to enhance them more. From this I could get a clear idea of which I preferred. 

This is further development of the ideas that I thought worked best. Here I was looking at if lower case, upper case, serif and sans serif worked best. I also explored colour a little bit to see what effect this had. I used my partners name to see how the overall idea was coming together. 

Final Piece. 

Name badge. 

After the crit I then re-worked my alphabet to come up with a better solution for the advice I had been given on my current final solution. 

These are a few alternative solutions that I came up with that still work around the same ideas that I had previously. From this I was able to choose one idea that I thought was more successful than my original.

I feel this is more successful than the original idea because it looks more sophisticated and I have moved away from this whole 'cartoony' look that came through my other idea for no particular reason. I've still kept the feature of 'bold' to show his personality but i've also chipped into the letters to represent the insecurity that is also part of him. 

I also tried the same technique but with lower case, I don't find this as successful because it doesn't represent this idea of a bold personality as well as upper case does and I don't find the overall impact strong enough. The 'ABC' at the bottom of the page is another way I could present the alphabet using the same ideas but I prefer the first 'reworked' idea.