Dave certainly knows his stuff and the examples of motion graphics were often stunning and inspiring. But in asking us to play around with similar ideas it felt like the cart was being put before the horse. How could we possibly create anything approaching what we had been shown? We'd not been taught the necessary techniques. We might just as well have been asked to build an H-bomb. Well that's how it felt.
We had the option to fall back on static type but in taking this route it felt like we were falling short.
In creating a typeface I didn't want to just manipulate objects into letter forms - it seemed a little obvious. I wanted to find a more indirect creative solution.
I decided to play around with an old stencil that I had at home. Initially I took some photographs of sunlight passing through them to create letter forms on the window sill. They were quite interesting and fluid but lacked a little in consistency and definition. Passing a pin-art toy through the stencils gave rise to a typeface that I was quite pleased with in terms of the creative process but which appeared to be machine-like and somewhat devoid of emotion/expression. I think I'm more attracted to natural forms. I could of course, if I had time, make my own hand-made letter forms out of clay or some other material and pass them through the same process to achieve a more expressive and unique typeface.However, I believe that this type would work in the right place.
Unfortunately the next task didn't seem to offer it that place - we had to select a poem or quote to incorporate our typeface into. I found this hard. By Dave's own admission we were approaching this task in reverse: the natural order is perhaps to design/generate type that has some sympathy with a text.
While I was searching for a suitably mechanistic phrase that would suit my type, I stumbled upon the Grouch Marx quip about 'Time wounds all heels'. I thought it was quite an amusing play on words and one that generated an image of type being created out of plasters. So the plaster typeface was born out of sympathy with the phrase, as you would expect. I don't find it a particularly startling solution, but by this time I was beginning to lose interest in the task. I think I would have been more inspired by a hand-drawn approach to type creation, besides I wanted to spend more time on the 'Love of Books' brief; a far more satisfying activity for me.
I did manage to resurrect the pin-art typeface in the First Thurday poster task. I think it works quite well here in the context of quite a 'dark' autumnal design. I think that I might have used it more as an opportunity to play around with one of those ubiquitous vector-style silhouette designs. Still, I enjoy trying to figure out how others have achieved particular effects so it satisfied my curiosity in that respect. I'm still of the opinion that it would have been better to have set the brief and then to have developed a typeface on the back of it rather than trying to shoehorn an existing typeface into an incongruous brief. I suppose in the way we tackled it there is a chance that you might come up with a serendipitous solution that you would never have thought of otherwise.
