Studio Brief 2 - Initial Ideas

To start off the project, several sketches were produced from tracing over the letters from Univers and Berthold, to see how different the two typeface were. These subtle differences included; width of the letter forms, slight difference in terminals and spurs and height of the tittles. By tracing and resizing the letterforms it made it easier to determine what looked better in terms of manipulation.

Through resizing and altering the height and weight of the letters, it would become more apparent which manipulations would relate to the ideas surrounding 'tranquility'. For example, adding height to the letters made them feel too 'stiff' and elongated. Where as, when the weight and width of the letters in both typefaces were changed it showed a more 'relaxed' and 'comfortable' look to them.

After finding that the letters work better when they were more relaxed, I began looking for ways to make the typeface 'flow' without joining the letters close together. Here you can see that by adding serif-like joins, the letters almost look as though they are pointing in a direction. From here, I needed to see whether this technique might work within a full, close kerning alphabet to understand whether it would flow in a relaxed but uniform manner.