I was getting a bit stuck on what to do with my "quotes" word; it looked good but the white gaps between each letter was uneven. I had tried to change that in Illustrator (as you can see from my design process) but it still didn't work very well...
So it was back to the gathering-research board for me, and I quickly had a flick through Mary Kate Mcdevitt's Hand Lettering Ledger. I really admire her work and how she manages to create different effects by simply changing the letterforms, and even though I didn't really want to create a fun appearance as such I wanted to figure out what sort of decorations she used.
I mainly focused on the decorations - as mentioned above - and quite liked how she created that 3D effect on some of her letterforms. Her designs leaned more on the "fun" side of things so I wasn't completely sure if I would use bold and bright colours, but I did find the way she drew things really inspirational.
I also had a flick through "New Vintage Type: Classic Fonts for the Digital Age" by Steven Heller and Gail Anderson for some colour combinations. I really want to use a monotone palette as I had noticed that the Oxford Literary Festival's primary colours were black and white but I just wanted to add one splash of colour to liven it up just a little bit. I feel that the monotone palette really created a professional and elegant appearance. Here are some photos I took of it while looking through:
After the problems I faced when it came to designing the DPS for "The Raven", I have decided to compile a list of inspirational book spreads to help me with my future designs and to explain my inspirations for previous ones.
I have mentioned that I haven't managed to find the actual copy of his designs as it is removed from their website, so instead I had to use an image that I had looked at over a year ago from one of my previous projects.
Instead of analysing the illustration I shall only look at the format, which is what I'll do for the other spreads.
What really caught my eye was the way the illustration was clearly dominant as it slightly overlaps onto the other page, and is in such deep, dark colours that the text (which although appears to be in black) looks muted in comparison.
The structure of the text is quite unusual as well as there are several indents, especially beside the number 2 in Roman numerals. I quite like the fact that it's a mixture of a very strict, traditional, left-aligned text and then they have this break right at the end which really sets it apart.
To summarise, I am inspired by:
The mixture of traditional & contemporary design
A light background with a dark illustration - it really brings out the illustration
I have mentioned during my Oxford Literary Festival Analysis that I will look at some Penguin classic book covers as I believe that they hold a very traditional and clean appearance which reflects the nature of the Oxford Literary Festival website. The target audience is very important to me so it is ideal to create something that is aimed towards them.
Instead of analysing book cover by cover, I shall just create a mood board so that I can pin-point any reoccurring features.
The first line are book from the 19th century but have more of a focus on illustrated patterns. Another running aspect in their designs is that they use the same serif font for the book title and a sans serif in uppercase for the author, although for Moby Dick and Alice in Wonderland they used the same font for the author's name. The position of these are usually centred but vary in terms of being right at the centre, top or bottom.
The second line also features books from the 19th century but they have a more serious format in the sense that there are strong barriers to separate the paintings/photographs from the author's name and book title. This restricts the painting despite it having a larger surface area than the type and creates the appearance of being aimed at more at adults rather than teenagers or children.
The type of paintings shown produces connotations of the upperclass because such paintings were extremely expensive and are normally shown in an art gallery or in castles where royals requested portrait paintings. This then makes the book cover seem as if it's aimed at an intellectual audience who takes reading literature seriously.
The third line is a mixture of covers that didn't fit in the structure of the first two.
I've realised that out of all of the type styles that I've looked at, I haven't actually tried out Blackletter. It's strange because I really admire that style although I tend to stray away from it because it looked quite difficult to do (and none of the quotes I had done previously had that kind of "voice").
Since I've chosen a gothic, Victorian quote, I am now able to carry out some brief research and gather inspirational Blackletter and gothic typography. I shall also have a look again at general calligraphy to see if there are ways to combine the two. Once again I want to have a look at historical pieces as well as contemporary ones.
Inspirational Pieces
I waited a little bit until I have done as much inspiration-gathering as possible before picking out the ones that I think would be best in terms of brief analysis for this little 'project'. I have briefly looked at Blackletter before [here] and was tempted to just fill that post out a little bit but as it was so long ago, it would take me ages to scroll through the pages. I've also done some research right at the beginning of this project [here] on calligraphy tutorials from YouTube but once again that was a very long time ago.
I have a rough idea of what I'm looking for and what kind of typeface I was going to do so this process was done very quickly and I picked a few designs that I find most inspirational as well as useful for this project.
This typeface, Victorian Swash, was exactly what I was looking for. It had that tall structure that mirrored Victorian architecture and it's high ceilings, and the small serifs only emphasise the elongated structure. This is because they are so small that there is more of a focus on the stems of the characters.
There is quite a contrast between uppercase and lowercase, as the uppercase forms seem to be twice the height of lowercase. Usually the cap-height is quite close to the x-height but here it seems to want to get far away from it as possible. The "halfway" point of the uppercase aligns with the top of the lowercase, which makes the character bottom-heavy because the rest of it's form is quite short. Nevertheless, it still retains that tall structure.
I watched this video the other day by James Victore who talked about how to find our own voice. Finding my voice is one of the most important things to be because I want people to have a look at my work and go, "Hey! That looks like it was done by Lizzie!"
I've only come to think of this recently when I began to take illustration a bit more seriously. I want to be able to do it in future after I leave university and during my last project I enjoyed doing it so much when I incorporated type.
You can imagine how happy I was when I found someone talking about this video and decided to check it out for myself. It's really short and sweet, and what the guy said was mind-blowing.
It was just so simple.
How could finding my voice be as simple as he puts it? He talks about how we, as creative people, are desperately searching for inspiration to find things that are in 'fashion' that we're just repeating and recycling designs so that it's not really 'us'. Here's a quick way on how to get our voice (as he describes):
1) Learn everything
2) Forget it
3) Design
It's crazy how simple it sounds and how I've never thought about it before. To all those who are reading this, you should definitely watch it and some of his other videos! He's very inspirational.
Reflective Learning - A Summary
After watching this video it made me think of how I was handling my project and the reason I was getting so stumped was because I'm trying a completely different technique and making it much harder for myself than it actually is. What I should do is revert back to what I was doing originally because not only would I get more work out of it but I could always showcase my experiments so if there's anything wrong I can quickly resolve it before I cause any more damage.
My next step is thus to completely restart my schedule so it looks a bit like this:
1) Learn everything - create blog posts of different type styles and analyse them, and do the same with inspirational pieces
2) Forget it all - move onto a different type of research such as book binding and then do some bookbinding
3) Design - start designing some more quotes from what I've learnt. If I am stuck I could always look back at my Pinterest board.
OR (if I'm going to carry on with the schedule I have so far)
1) Learn everything - write quote down and think of it's voice, collect lots of different inspirational pieces and type styles
2) Forget it all - shove it all to the side
3) Design - start designing and sketching
The list above is (obviously) heavily inspired by the technique he talks about and it looks like it could work! I wish I had found his videos sooner, because now I'm worried that I'm running out of time.
It's a bit annoying because of the fact I keep changing my schedule and it's kind of messing up my project (and my mind hahaha). This then made me think... OH DEAR. I might have to just scrap what I said before!
Annoying, isn't it?
I'm so sorry if I'm confusing everyone! I'm just writing exactly what I'm thinking of to ease my mind. But to summarise everything I've just said I have created two kind of timetables so I need to figure out which one would be best for me.
Learning Outcomes: [2] Developed a high level of intellectual and conceptual involvement with their chosen subject area, including skills of project proposal, documentation of project development and the presentation of outcomes. [6] Developed skills of critical thinking, analysis and evaluation.
I'm aiming to do one or two quotes from famous politicians and during my research I decided to go with either: "It always seems impossible until it's done" by Nelson Mandela or "Whatever you are, be a good one" by Abraham Lincoln. The first thing I did after deciding was write a list of connotations and things associated with politics.
Mood Board - Existing Designs
I found it quite hard to come up with some ideas so instead I went straight to my research stage by gathering some inspirational pieces on Pinterest. Out of curiosity I had a look at existing products that used these two quotes and found that they had been done quite a lot.
This wasn't going to dampen my spirit, because I thought that even though these quotes had been done more than once, I could always make mine look different. From this I drew up a mood board on all of the pieces that showed these two quotes that I found eye-catching:
(all images from my Pinterest board which has the original illustrators/designers credits)
There's one consistent factor with all of these designs; they are all hand-rendered (well, all except for two) and these are mostly done in calligraphy or a chalk-lettering. I found this strange because I associated politics with strong, structured serifs, yet these are all done in quite a dainty way. This shows that instead of making the quotes look political because they were told by a politician, they focused more on the message itself.
This makes the message a bit more personal because someone had taken it upon themselves to design a quote with their own hand, so small "mistakes" would show through which they might not correct on the computer because the mistakes we make makes us human. These subtle mistakes or the human hand could thus relate to the politicians themselves in that they weren't perfect and had to go through a lot to get where they were.
I want to do something different and the image on the bottom left really caught my eye. I hadn't thought about using different materials for typography! Maybe I could try out using paper or even using watercolours or something unusual, like feathers or twigs? Even doing something different with paper would be acceptable because it's not the simple case of using a pen or ink. It provides a texture of some sort.
I want to keep my options open, however, so went back to my mood board on Pinterest to pick out the most inspirational images. I would like to incorporate more illustration to my designs and something different to what I had already done so far.
Inspirational Pieces - Analysis
It's quite difficult to just look for a certain type of typographic style due to the diversity in the piece above. However I am keen on trying paper-cute typography so I shall look at that first (unless I change my mind and use another material).
I don't really know anything about this paper technique but I can tell by looking at this that it's very time-consuming. They would've had to cut around each individual space and make sure that the silhouettes are recognisable in order to see the words properly.
Here I shall cover the "Illustration & Typography" section. I know that I may/may not have experimented with calligraphy that much, but I thought I'd treat this week as a 'tester' week before diving into the type of hand-lettering that I enjoy the most.
I received this top as a Christmas present and fell in love with the layout of type as well as the mix with illustration. I do have a soft spot for illustration, and to see it working so well with type makes this 'piece' all the more inspirational.
The type styles used reflect that of chalk lettering, and I'm hoping to do another post solely on it so that I can provide a comparison between it and this piece.
This link with chalk lettering is shown in the way that some of the words are shaded. In my previous project I noticed that the shading was done quite differently in chalk lettering to make the words stand out a little more even though it was very subtle. Such an effect can be seen in the words "Welcome" and "Demon Blood Special". I have briefly experimented with different shading types in my previous project “Words” but I hope to explore it a little bit more in this project.
What also brings up connotations of it being influenced by chalk lettering is that there's only really one colour used throughout the piece, with the only other colour being the background (the top), yet somehow they've managed to make it clear where the boundaries are between the illustration and type. This is due to the way they've drawn their thick lines to separate each element. This is quite an interesting technique and if I ever create a piece with only two colours I would like to use it.
I've created a new board "FMP Inspiration" on Pinterest to separate this project from my previous ones, and for the last couple of days I have been going through multiple websites to gather some inspiration. I'm hoping to gather as many different types of type styles as possible so that I could experiment a little more than I did in my APP Words.
Each type of lettering will be separated into multiple sections, as seen in my to-do list shown in my previous post. Here I shall cover the "Calligraphy" section.
I'm finding it quite hard doing calligraphy despite looking through lots of videos on YouTube, and that's when I realised that I haven't really looked at any closely and analysed them. So I went onto my Pinterest board and selected a few that I find most inspiring. Dear Lillie - http://dearlillieblog.blogspot.co.uk/
This isn't strictly a calligraphy based piece but I decided to include it in this category anyway because of the way most of the words were drawn. I should've placed it in my Chalk Lettering section but... Oh well.
What really caught my eye about this piece in particular was the way they've drawn "How do I" and "Let me count". It's so beautiful and elegant because of the soft curves and the little decorative swashes, and this reminds me of those curly plants (I think they're called Curly Wurly Rush or something) which brings back memories of my childhood. This thus creates a very personal and 'warm' atmosphere to the piece, which reflects the message written. The swashes also make the type appear slightly delicate as it thins out the character slightly, which could mirror the delicacy of the subject matter.
This typeface has a therefore feminine appearance due to elegant swashes and letterforms, but it is granted some 'strength' through the use of shading. This shading is very similar to that used in chalk lettering and gives the letters a bit more structure as well as making them stand out a bit more. This shading only applies to the main body of the letterforms, and not to the swashes, emphasising their fineness.
I have seen quite a few pieces where they used a similar typeface although perhaps without the shading - an aspect carried across from chalk lettering - so this could quite possibly be a current typographic trend. By including something like this in my design will make it seem modern as I'm flowing with what's in fashion.
I gathered a few videos and dip pen/calligraphy tutorials and time lapses to help me out the next time I experiment with my two sets. Even though I had a look at them before my second exercise I didn't really concentrate on how they held the pen and how much ink they added, so now I shall look at them all with fresh eyes in hope of improving my calligraphy!
This tutorial shows how to use a fountain pen rather than a dip pen, but the reason I've included it is because she talks about how to hold the pen and what the ideal angle it is to do so. The way she writes is similar to Blackletter which is another type style I'd like to explore.
Taking a closer look at her pen it resembles closely to the roundhand dip pen I have; she doesn't produce a strong contrast between thick and thin strokes, and the end of the fountain pen is straight rather than pointed.
Rather than it being a tutorial like the video above, this one is a time lapse where they show very clearly how they write the word "Flourish". Because the video is quite slow I can concentrate on how they hold the pen and just how delicate the results can be. The ink had to be topped up regularly, and they sometimes had to 'colour' parts in. There is actually quite a lot of ink on the paper because it's very 'shiny' so I'm guessing they had to leave it to dry for a while.
I was quite interested to see the guide they used because previous time lapse videos didn't necessarily show this.
I'm getting a bit worried that I haven't been able to experiment with different styles as I wanted to, and I realised that it's because I'm starting to hit a brick wall in terms of inspiration. To help "cure" this I went onto as many websites I could and started to collect lots of images of letterpress posters. This is because during my research on the Industrial Revolution in my previous year I pointed out that people were very interested in an assortment of decorative type, most notably "3D" type, Egyptian and Fat Faces.
My collection is all on my pinterest board, Typography, but I've included some images below on the ones that I find most inspirational.
I'm hoping to feature a quote in some sort of banner, and I've mentioned in a post that I would like to try out different banners styles. This poster is a perfect example of type on a banner so I'm giving it a special mention so that I could always refer back to it if I'm stuck.
However I find that each sentence is broken up and I find myself pausing after reading each banner. If it had just been one banner with different twists and turns then the writing would've flowed a lot better. I shall take note of this when I develop my design!
The breaks created could, on the other hand, make it easier for the viewer to read the advertisement. If this poster was indeed on display during the Industrial Revolution most of the public were unable to read very well and so this makes it more readable for them.
I noticed that my sketches were becoming a bit redundant and that I was running out of ideas, so while it was really quiet at work I took the chance to do some new sketches, drawing inspiration from the patterns of some of the clothes there. Even though these patterns are completely unrelated to this project and doesn't feature any typography it didn't really matter because I find that it's nice to gather inspiration from almost anything, and it was a breather from what I had been looking at the past couple of weeks.
Inspiration (please excuse the quality of the photos!)
All patterns etc belong to Long Tall Sally
Nevertheless I did repeat one or two previous sketches, but I took them further by drawing them in different styles. For example I developed the ideas of sketching some buntings to dangle from the rim of the travel mug, as I drew each letter of the quote with different patterns.
I actually find watching YouTube videos most inspiring, especially if it's a time lapse where the artist or typographer show their progress from start to finish. I shall leave inspirational videos here so that I could always refer back to them in case I needed that inspirational boost.
Even though the title says that it's YouTube videos, I've included some videos I found on vimeo as well.
On the way to an exhibition in London I stumbled upon a series of chalk lettering outside a pub, and when I looked closer I realised that they weren't actually done with chalk but some sort of paint. Nevertheless it had that chalk appearance and I really liked the type styles so I took photos of them anyway.
I've been interested in this type of lettering since I had a look at Matthew Tapia's work on Pinterest, as I really like the way they lay each element out and it has that 'traditional' appearance.
Unfortunately I do not know the letterer behind these 'posters' so if anyone knows who did them, please let me know so I can credit them!
I am not very experienced in hand lettering so one of the first things I did other than gather inspiration was watch some videos on YouTube. It’s surprising how many good tutorials and ‘speed paints’ there are on YouTube, and I could spend forever just watching all of the videos.
Below are some of my favourite videos and those that I find most relevant for this project. I concentrated on mainly the layout of the type and how to draw/paint/sketch different type styles such as cursive, Blackletter and sans serif.
Here 'Redhead Cobweb Crafts' covers the basic principals of typography where she takes the Times New Roman typeface and mimics it, looking at where the x-height, cap-height and baseline are. Then she shows how to shade in the thick strokes as well as drawing serifs.
In the second part of her video she shows how to layout a phrase by circling 'major words' which will help decide which words would be emphasised. What's interesting about this was that when she wrote out the words she works from the middle, out, so that each letter would be placed at an equal distance (so that the last couple of letters wouldn't be squashed to fit on the line). She briefly talks about how to do other typestyles and how to shade letters.
Unlike the previous video, Maureen Wilson (Made by Marzipan) talks about what kind of materials to use such as the ideal paper and ink/pen choice. She also stresses the importance of analysing existing typefaces to see how thick and thin the strokes are, where they sit on the lines, how 'curvy' they are, before moving onto drawing the letters.
She mentions how we shouldn't worry if the letters aren't perfect, because "minor flaws can add charm and interest to the piece." This was quite a relief to hear as I had been worrying about drawing my letters perfectly!
Another aspect that separates this video from the previous one is that she briefly talks about the connotations of the type style and that, for example, for words like 'love' how it's nicer to use script. She also says the layout of the type could reflect the quote.
I watched a video interview on Steve Simpson and this really inspired me to go back to my childhood hobby; doodling. I just loved drawing doodles in the margins of my school book, and the way that Simpson has assembled his illustrations made it appear like he was bunching up a group of doodles. He creates such perfect compositions, and his cartoon characters just shows that illustration doesn't mean that everything has to be extremely perfect in terms of anatomy, but cartoons are acceptable as well! This was really inspiring for me because I am a bit of a perfectionist and got bogged down by the thought of having to draw 'perfect' characters... Now I can simply draw cute and funny little cartoons.
This is the video in question:
It's just so inspiring! Especially when they show his little sketches, which he also does in his portfolio so that we could see how he managed to put the illustration together.
After watching this video I decided to do some quick doodles in my sketchpad of almost anything related to this project. I tried out using different coloured pencils but it seems that they didn't really show up on the page as well as I thought, hence why it's difficult to see them in these photos.
Typography is one of the main focus of this travel mug design, so I shall first do some research on inspirational typographers and perhaps hand-lettering artists. I shall possibly include an overlap of typography and illustration in this post to make things easier, but I might do a separate post on illustration on its own.
I had built up on this post throughout my project, so these inspirational typographers were ones that I found over the duration of the whole research and experimentation process. I might create a new post later on if I find anyone near to the end of the project. Moodboard
Now that I know the brief of one of my APP, I’m going to continue to look for inspiration on hand lettering as I still don’t really know much about it. Here is my first mood board from the “possible ideas” post:
I want to look mainly at typography and their form, but I’ll also include those with illustration in it (or I’ll never find it again!) Now that I have Pinterest I find it easier to gather inspiration because I wouldn’t have to create a mood board in Photoshop and link everything, as Pinterest links the images back to their original sources.
To view more of my inspirations you can look at my ‘Typography’ collection here. I have collected as many inspirational pieces I can so not all of them would relate to this project.
Now that I’m working on sketching the characters I shall look up on Google for some reference images and to also find out some little details about them so that I could jot it down in my sketchpad and use as inspiration.
Most of the inspiration for my characters was taken from the bullet-points I had constructed when reading on London folklore. It was easier for me to jot down these notes at that time because I find that I often produce images in my head when reading.
I made sure to collect as many references as I could because I didn’t just want to copy them, but adapt them into how I wanted the characters to be posed. I focused more on the birds because I wasn’t very familiar with the species – especially goshawks and starlings – and it was important that I could see the differences between each one for when it comes to the sketching stage.
Sketching
Taking all of these references into account I then started doing some sketches, using the ‘line’ technique shown in my storyboard research.
At the corner of the page I jotted down some notes I took when looking at these reference images, and also when I briefly researched into the three different birds to understand the hierarchy between them.
Conclusion:
With all of my characters sketched I can now place them ‘within the scene’. I have decided to not do the Blind Beggar’s Daughter because it resembled Disney too much, and I wanted to choose something that isn’t similar to other stories. This is why I had decided to do Sherlock in the end because it would be nice to include a better-known narrative to show that they all take place in London.
Having been inspired by the storyboards I analysed, I wanted to research further into their composition methods to figure out how they made their scenes trigger emotions as well as create depth.
This basically means to have a point of perspective, and it's generally better to use more than one (they have advised to use three vanishing points).
Use grids
This will allow me to figure out where to place people instead of having them dotted randomly that it almost looks as if they're floating in mid-air. The grid will provide a sort of ground, and this will help me work with my perspective point as well.
Use foreground, mid-ground and background
This means placing objects at different 'levels' in order to create depth. For example if we were on the Westminster bridge looking at the Big Ben, the Big Ben will be in the far background, the cars on the bridge on the other side in the background, the cars on the our side in the mid-ground, and we're at the foreground.
Group multiple characters
This wouldn't necessarily apply to my illustration as I'm not doing a storyboard, but if I was I could make it easier by grouping multiple characters together and labelling them so I know where each one is as I move onto the next board.
Composition
I went onto Google and soon collected a small list of various compositions, drawing sketches beside them to help me to understand them a bit more.
However what I couldn't really understand was the golden ratio; it was quite difficult to see how it actually works, but I think it follows a smooth curve...
I’m still a bit unsure on how I’m going to bring together all of the London stories that I’ve read and have found interesting, but I know that one of my ideas involved laying out London as a map and pin-pointing all of the stories at key landmarks. With this in mind, I looked at infographics, maps and illustrations of London.
Another reason why I wanted to look at existing illustrations is so that I could get a general idea of what has been done before so that I could use them as an inspiration but then create something entirely different.
During my trip to London I took photos of the Big Ben and the surrounding area. On a recent Facebook status of mine where I asked people to name me three of London's most popular tourist destinations, all of them mentioned the Big Ben. I'm not too sure if I'm going to couple the Big Ben with other tourist attractions as I think I don't want it to be overloaded with that and “too London-y”.
Therefore I am going to experiment with the idea of drawing both the Big Ben and surrounding area, and Big Ben with other tourist attractions.
Here are the photos I had taken:
As you can see from my photos, I was either too close or too far, and the sun was really low in the sky so you could only see the silhouette of the buildings. Therefore I went into Google Maps and took some screenshots of the area as well as looking at Google Images to see what I could find.
My main focus was on the Big Ben because, as mentioned above, it was the most popular location choice.
