Design Skills Brief 2 - OUGD403

BRIEF - To take one of my ten finished letterforms from Brief 1 and digitally enhance it further to create a full typeface. 

Below is my chosen letter I will be further manipulating into a typeface as decided in my critique:

Illustrator Workshop

Session 1 - In the first session of the illustrator workshops, it was purely learning the basics of the programme. For me, this session was not really helpful as I already knew what the session was going over, although I did understand the point of it. We was introduced to the pen tool and was given a couple of tasks to practise with it:

Session 2 - In this sessions I found it more interesting as I learnt some shortcuts and techniques that I had not previously known. Although to start with we where looking at the pathfinder tool which I have had previous experience with and so did not learn much with this:

A new technique I learnt, was how to create your own brush stroke. I found this interesting to learn as I now know this is an option for future work and a new technique I could use: 

Below we were looking at the rotate tool. I was always aware of this but wasn't fully sure on how to use it. After the session I am now confident with using it:

Looked into the live paint tool which will always be useful when working with colour:

After I had a few illustrator tutorials and as I was quite confident with the software anyway, I started to develop my letter form. I wasn't sure whether I should keep the design how it originally looked or whether to develop it further. I started by sketching some ideas and then scanning and digitising these in illustrator to see the result: 

I tried showing the 'forces' by including arrows on the letters. I also lessened the letter so it had a very thin line weight. I do not think this idea is visually effective and feel my original piece suited the concept better.

I again tried a thin line weight to what I had originally planned and tried the letter as a single line form. I do like the overall look but again, I feel my original letter above suites what am I trying to communicate the most effectively. I feel this is due to the idea below not communicate a force or showing the letter is coming away from itself. 

After today's illustrator sessions I started creating my full typeface with my chosen piece from my 10 letterforms. I decided to keep the original design from Brief 1 as it was the most effective. Below I have started on creating a couple of letters and now will start to develop more of them:

I have begun more letterforms but focused on the straight structured letters first. I have found it difficult to create the rounded letters as when using the pen tool I tend to make them out of proportion. I am going to use the last illustrator tutorial to ask about technique and see where I am going wrong:

The main problem I have faced when digitising the typeface was creating the rounded letters. As shown  below, I have not been able to get the hang of rounding letters and have needed to practise this over the weeks in the illustrator tutorials. The problem when creating the letter is it has a dint in them:

I also struggled with showing them in proportion, with this 'Q', I tried copying and pasting a correct curved line and the overall look came out completely wrong:

However, after the tutorial sessions and after practising on a previous pen tool task we were given, I managed to get the right look I wanted for rounded edged letters and so could start developing the typeface as a whole:

Final and Evaluation

This is my final typeface. It shows the forces within physics, represented by the gaps in the letterforms trying to show the letter pulling away from itself. I feel it overall works okay, but if I developed this further, I would consider trying to represent the letters in a 3d physical representation instead of printed. I feel it could communicate my word more clearly if developed but it was the most effective out of my ten letterforms to take forward for the creation of a full typeface.

 I also played around with this slightly with the idea of a 3d physical representation using tracing paper but again it did not entirely communicate what I intended: