ALPHABET SOUP//TYPEFACE

The brief was to produce a typeface which visually communicates a partner's interests or personality traits. The aim was to create this typeface on A1 tracing paper along side a Name bags for your partner to wear which had to be 45mm x 90mm. We were given a series of questions to ask a partner, here are a few from the sheet, which i asked Greg , my partner.

1. When were you most happy? - when Everton beat MAN U in the semi finals
2. What is our greatest fear? - spiders
3. What is your earliest memory? - Playing football in a feels with Grandad
4. What would your super power be? - stretchy legs 
5. What makes you unhappy?- referees and spiders
6. where would you most like to live? - London
7. if you could change one thing about yourself what would it be? - Height
8. Any bad habits? - smoker
9. Favourite smell? - Chocolate

From these questions I came up with five related words which were appropriate to Greg and 5 more related to them, in order to generate more ideas.

After thinking of connecting words, i took two of them and combined them so that they described him better, for example I used confident and chocoholic and produce letter which work together with the words. 

So from these questions i came up with the idea of basing my alphabet either on Greg's love of football or hate for spiders. started to look at imagery which liked firstly to football. 

I have started to look at characteristics which relate to spiders as i think that there is some good imagery, in comparison to football which i am finding difficult to relate to. However I have decided which typeface i will base my final Letters on, It will be helvetica and it will be very bold, I will slightly change a few of the letters so that they are less recognisable as  helvetica, and more original. I have drawn all of them out and filled them in with my sharpie i have copies of them before they are filled in so that i can fill them with something else.

you can tell that a few of the letters have been slightly alternated, like the B which has a tilt on it and the Q which has also been modified. After deciding which typeface to uses i then started to play around with pattern and shape.

I then looked at how i could make the letters connect to greg, they had to be link to his personality or his likes or dislikes. the most obvious thin to do was foot ball and as greg said that one of the things which he hated most in the world was referees i decided to do my letters in referee stripes. However after our crit, the feedback was that the letters looked like they were linked to newcastle United football club which was not was i was trying to communicate so i decided not to use these as my final letter designs. from Greg's questions i found that there were more things which he didn't like that had imagery which could be used more, I decided to look at using spider webs as a fill for my letter forms, as Greg's greatest fear is spiders and i thought this would be a bit different from doing something which he loved. 

I came up with this idea for my final designs, i this it is visually pleasing but i think maybe if i were to do the project again i would ask more questions about what he does like as it seems a little bit contradictory basing my letters on something which Greg doesn't like. After Finalising my designs I got them printed out on A1 in Black in order to trace them on to A1 tracing paper!