In our Illustrator workshop session with Simon, we were taught how to use the pen tool, one of the most beneficial skills in Graphic Design and also something I didn't really have any experience in.
We started off with an exercise sheet which taught us all the main uses of the pen tool and how to manage them.
The first exercise was to trace a star shape, each point had an instruction to help us learn the fundamental ways of using the pen tool.
I went through the excercises practicing the skills learned from simon and the activity sheet and managed to finish them pretty quickly.
The hardest part of all of them was the last excercise which was a strange shape with curves, it definitely took the longest but I was pretty happy when I'd finished it!
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So after I had practiced using the pen tool I put it to use on tracing a letter which Simon provided. After tracing it and seeing how wonky the lines are, it showed just how much practice I needed to do to get things right for my actual typeface!
In it's place, I attempted forming this "g" by creating circles and then joining lines and removing them to form the shape till it was reproduced but with no jagged lines.
Finally I am ready to begin using illustrator to create my own typeface based on my theme of 'extract'. My favourite letter I did out of the ten was the letter 'a' so that is where i started.
After tracingmy letter from the original drawing, there were aspects of it which weren't right like the circle patterns inside the shape so what I did was a made new circles with the shape tool and it looked a lot better.
I used the widening tool to make slight adjustments and then it was finished!
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For the rest of the alphabet I decided I was going to draw each letter out in pencil and then later on scan them all in and slowly perfect them on illustrator this will be time consuming but I think that it'll be worth it with the end result!
The next part of my process was to illustrate it all in illustrator using techniques learned in the inductions. This part took a very long time but as I'd already created the idea and sketched it, I knew what I was doing so it was quite simple to follow my drawings.
The next process I had to go through was the layout of my media. I was very happy with how my last one was positioned and therefore decided to follow through on this piece too. In doing so, I created some glyphs to compliment the typeface and then set it out as below.
I saved it into a .tiff file and went down to some reprographic printers in leeds with some others on the course and got them printed A1 scale in response to our brief requirements. I was very happy with the results.
I really enjoyed this brief and learned/gained a lot of knowledge, experience and understanding of letterforms. Each letter had a lot of time and effort put into it and i think the overall result was worth it. However, I feel like I have let myself down in one aspect or another.
To begin with, this started as one of our manually produced letterforms for our words, mine being 'extract'. It started off as a really good visual interpretation of the word but I think I have failed to achieve that effect digitally, essentially, not fulfilling a main requirement in my brief.
If I had more time on this brief and more money to print with I think I would experiment with different ways of displaying the typeface, keeping the style but possibly changing it from a block font to just the edges. Looking at it now, I think that would of worked better.
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