Project 5: 10 Analog Sketches

This is the beginning of a collaboration between Visual Communication 1 and Typography 1.  From the two point of view paragraphs written for Visual Communication, we were to narrow the 10 words associated with each paragraph down to 5 to be used for Typography.  

POV1 = interaction, emotion, variations, negative, positive, reaction, sadness, love, cheer, family  BECAME = interaction, family, love, cheer, memory

POV2 = sustain, interactive, alternative, static, creation, physical, community, popular, subculture, technology  BECAME = alternative, community, educate, inventing, sustain

We were then given a list of fonts to choose from to use.  We are only to use one for the whole project.  I decided to write them out and see which one I really connected with and felt the message behind all of the words that I may be using.

Above is my document with all of the words that I may use in all of the fonts that we're given.  I wanted to see the fonts in all uppercase and all lowercase at a similar point size.  I slowly deleted the fonts until I was down to three.

I was getting ready to message some of my friends which font they liked better.  When I took a picture of the remaining document with my phone, I realized which font I wanted to use.  That font was Trade Gothic.

My preliminary drawings before the 10 analog sketches.  I wanted to find some kind of direction, before I started sketching away.  Below are the 10 sketches that I ended up with.

FAMILY.  The main thought was that there tends to be one person that stands out more than the rest in the family, and that is the person that watches over us all.

INTERACTION.  My focus was on the word action, mostly on the act part of the word.  For the letters in "inter" I overlapped them and where the letters overlapped I left it white and colored in the rest of the letters.  My thought was that the letters were connected to create the action, that was so big it broke into two.

ALTERNATIVE.  My thought was to focus on alter, because I am trying to alter how we perceive words with this project.  So I thought alter would be a good part to focus on, so I put it in black uppercase letters on top to stand out.  It also split the word up in half to how we pronounce it.

CHEER.  My thoughts were to visually portray what it's like when there is cheering for teams or friends.  Normally cheering starts quiet and isolated, then slowly grows larger and gets more overpowering.

COMMUNITY.  A community is a tight-knit group to me.  So I wanted to go with that thought and bring the letters in close, feeling almost as if they are too close.  I used the white space to help give the tight-knit group of community by framing the square.

EDUCATE.  Education and educating anyone is a repetitive process, because it is not done as soon as the lesson or fact is learned the first time.  There are many topics that while we grow up we are learning and relearning, but more specific parts about each area, so I repeated the EDU, which is often associated with schools, and thus education.

INVENTING.  I wanted to show more of a playful and in process word - such as inventing.  Based on how we read in American, left to right, top to bottom, the word will still be read correctly.  I wanted to emphasize on vent, because often the reason that we are inventing is because there was something that upset us and often we vent when things are not going as we wanted them to or if we ran into problems.

LOVE.  I wanted to keep the letters close together, because love is something that can be felt and is a very specific emotion.  I did not want to be cliche and form a heart, so my thought was to try to have the letters connect in some way, as well as kind of jumble together because love is never straight forward; it's always sneaking in taking over.

MEMORY.  A memory can be something that we know fully what it is, or we only remember in fragments.  More often than not, we cannot remember the full memory, especially not at the same time - so I thought it would be interesting to write the word memory with random letters not present.

SUSTAIN.  Often when people talk about sustain, they are referencing keeping a product, process or object that is depleting.  My thought was to go with that idea and have the word slowly disappearing, so I erased off some of the pencil.