OUGD603 HARRISON ADVENT CALENDAR - PAPER CUT & DIGITAL EXPERIMENTS

After initial research was undertaken, the next stage was to crack right on with doing some sketches and initial experiments, to see what works and what doesn't.

Main inspiration:
This piece from the research was the main inspiration for the designs, as it is bold, clean, modern, everything the brief was asking for.

Started off by experimenting with existing typefaces, as this was thought to be the easiest way of creating the lettering, rather than creating a new typeface from scratch. Typefaces you can see in use here are Kitten (varying weights), Big Joe, and Lust Script. These typefaces were chosen as they are all very clean and contemporary, whilst also adding a little something extra to the design. Big Joe is a bit different to the others as I wanted to see how a much more structured typeface would look compared to the scripted ones. It definitely has a much more formal appearance, but one that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Using my type research as guidelines, I started drawing my own typeface, combining several elements from my research together, choosing the bits I liked the best, and making some up as I went along. It has actually turned out a lot better than expected, however it is nowhere near as bold and heavy weighted as the "twenty five" example. I'm not sure if this is a bad thing or not though. 

One of the phrases that was being experimented with was then drawn up on full, taking a lot of inspiration from the Kitten typeface. 

The phrase was traced onto white paper, and then cut out using a scalpel and placed onto a red card background. This makes the text stand out a lot more, and the red colour makes it look a lot more festive as well.

It was digitally altered on Photoshop to make the colours pop, and to cut it into more of a square shape.

Each letter was stuck to the background using foam pads, to give the design a bit more depth and dimension to it, making the letter stand out a lot more on the page.

The design looked a little plain, so green triangles were cut out and dotted around the background, to make it look a bit more fun, not as plain.

Reflection:
This has been a fairly successful first experiment, and I now know what works and what doesn't. One thing I've noticed from blogging about this work is that my lettering is quite uneven in weighting, and it generally looks better with the heavier weight. I either need to work on my type drawing or find a typeface which does the job for me. Looking back at the "twenty five" inspiration, I am realising it works so well because the text is very close together, and the swashes all interloop and cross over one another, creating an artwork as a whole, rather than two individual words. This is something I need to look at and figure out how to incorporate into this design. Perhaps this results in changing the phrase to something more simple.