Typograhy

Typography Projects

The semester brake is officially over and next week my new classes will be starting. I decided to go with illustration for the following half a year, hoping to improve some more 🙂

But first I need to sum up some results from the last semester. After the 1st semester was over we were supposed to manage our time and finish three small projects and a big one until the end of the second one, including the documentation layout. Each project stands in connection to a previously discussed topic during classes:

Of course all projects had to be presented at the end of the second semester. Each student got only 3 minutes 🙁

Well, that’s all for now. I know I haven’t made any updates for a long time… But since I’m running this blog on a non-commercial basis it’s not my first priority right now. I’ve been doing a whole lot of digital art projects and some ink/gouache training, so I wasn’t lazy during the brake, ok 😉

Oh and all the work I’m showing you is for informative means only! Please do NOT copy!

in Typograhy  by Savina 0 comments

The Documentation – The most Important Project in 2nd Semester

The documentation of the 2nd semester is the most important and time consuming project! It’s covering the main work done during the course of the past half-year presented as a typographically demanding printed medium. This means that it counts for the final exam in FC and Typography!

The whole book has about 90 pages, format A5, adhesive binding. The paper for the cover is 300 g/m² and the one for the pages is 130 g/m². I paid about 35 Euros for the printing and paper.

By the way, here is my exam schedule with some further descriptions.

 

in Design Foundation / Typograhy  by Savina 0 comments

Design Foundation Course and Typography

Time for a short update on DFC and Typography 🙂

This semester the DFC’s main topic will be “Von (Dr)innen nach (Dr)außen“ – Dialog, Kommunikation, Interaktion (From the inside to the outside – Dialogue, Communication, Interaction).  The students are supposed to explore the new seminar room and create a connection to the outside (the building’s back garden etc.) It’s a little bit hard to describe the situation but I’ll post some photos soon.

But talking about photos: The first homework is going to be about capturing the current state of both, the inside and outside space. In order to do so we have been given the task to take photographs and describe the situation in words. All findings are to be collected in a sketchbook. Our results throughout this whole semester will be building the basis for our final big project (final exam).
And this leads us to Typography. All acquired theoretical knowledge during the following months will be of big use for the final project in DFC, which will be a printed medium created in collaboration with the Typography program. What’s also new this time is the possibility to work in groups most of the time.

I asked a few students in the third semester about the workload and I didn’t like what I heard 😀 Everyone warned me it’s going to be hell! It’s going to be the busiest time during the whole bachelor ever (perhaps except the bachelor exam itself…). The third semester was referred to as heaven 😀 That’s where the students are finally allowed to choose their main programs and the workload is considerably smaller.
Considering this info and the fact that I’m already packed with assignments (I’ll try to pull off the illustrator’s drawing class AND one additional sketching excursion class) I’ll probably won’t be able to post a lot, but of course I’ll keep summing up and give tips as much as possible!

Next time I’ll compile this semester’s schedule (only premade for the first semester) and share it with you 😉

in Design Foundation / Typograhy  by Savina 0 comments

Typography, First Homework Project: Word-Images

As I already mentioned in an earlier post I have to tackle four typography projects. Actually it’s not mandatory to get finished in the semester break but our professor urged us to do so since we’ll get new demanding assignments in our second semester. Everything must be delivered at the end of the upcoming semester.

I have to admit I really underestimated the amount of time one has to spend on these projects… I merely finished the design for one of the smaller ones and the big one is 60% done. Right now I’m working on the second small task (small sounds like it’s get done fast 😀 how misleading).

Everything I share with you at this point may change during the course of the next few months but I’ll post anyway.

wortbilder

This is going to be a 29x40 cm poster. It's depicting the human body parts using word-images. So basically you know the part's name by simply reading it 🙂

Next week I’ll probably post the Media and Communication presentation-documentation (sounds like modern poetry). Unfortunately for my English-speaking readers it’s going to be exclusively in German (sorry ^^”) Prepare for three huge entries in the loyal2art.DE domain!

That’s it for now…I’ll be getting back to work now ò_ó

in Typograhy  by Savina 0 comments

Go Typomon!

Time for fun typography homework!

This time we were supposed to create 15 different monsters/animals by using typographical characters only. There were different approaches to deal with this task:

  • minimalism: the less characters used to depict an existing animal everyone still recognizes the better
  • create one huge, extremely complicated creature
  • concentrate on one font
  • and my choice: ANARCHY!

Well, I did have a plan (so it’s a systematical anarchy ;)). I picked an interesting font and just started trying out and analyzing the font’s characteristics.

Here is my fine assortment of Typomons!

This exercise is supposed to make you see more than just boring letters and teach you to make a more illustrative use of typography. And it’s supposed to make fun I guess 😀

in Typograhy  by Savina 0 comments

Word-Images

Our next homework in typography is called “Word-Images” (Wortbilder). We were supposed to create 11 different images (or animations) made out of the word to be depicted. All images had to be in the same format and only sans serif fonts were allowed.

Here is my contribution (hope you get the idea):

word-images

here the words in english from top-to-bottom and left-to-right: to avoid, narrow, lust (sexually), pointed, battle, hunger, fear, pacemaker, error, mirror, dead

Unfortunately some of the word-images weren’t as obvious to others as expected…  But I wanted to have fun and try different things, so I guess it’s all right 😉

in Typograhy  by Savina 0 comments

Typography – Back to the Basics

Over the past centuries thousands of new fonts have been designed. Some emerged out of new means of production others had the purpose to please certain aesthetical or cultural needs. All fonts are organized under the DIN standard 16518 although it has to be mentioned that this classification isn’t very accurate (example: Group Nr. 6 refers to the sans serif fonts which form about 80% of all fonts, hence this group is very imprecise and ought to have more subdivisions) . Unfortunately currently there is no official replacement.

Every font has its own distinctive features, sometimes very obvious ones and sometimes on a rather subtle scale. The best way to memorize some of the basic differences is to actually write some of the key-letters down (with a pen, not digitally). In typography class we were given four pages, each with a different font example, which we had to copy. The fonts were:

  • Garamond (key-letters a, P)
  • Times New Roman (key-letters a,b,g,A,G)
  • Bodoni BE (key-letters e,g,o,R,k)
  • Clarendon (key-letters a,g,t,R,G)

Additionally a short historical background was included to every font (which really helps you memorize the features better). If you want to try it out too you can open any program that can process words in different fonts like Word/OpenOffice/InDesign etc. and type the key-letters. Then you just get your pen and a piece of paper and start copying. Nevertheless it’s a good idea to print out the letters really big and organized in line-grids like this:

line-grid

example font Clarendon

in Typograhy  by Savina 0 comments

Bitmap Font Design Homework

In Typography we were assigned to create our own bitmap font from real life objects.

If you’re not sure what bitmap fonts are here’s a short explanation:

Bitmap (also known as raster graphics image) is a term used when referring to computer graphics and it describes a data structure compound of a rectangular grid of pixels. Every single pixel has exactly one color-value assigned to it. Bitmap-based formats (like BMP, GIF, JPEG/JFIF, PNG und TIFF) are best suited for displaying complex images like photos, which cannot be processed as detailed with vector graphics.

So basically, our real-life bitmap font needed a raster and objects to fill in the space describing the character. Some students used burgers, playing cards, candles, bottle caps or Lego. Everyone was really creative 🙂

My idea came to my mind really quickly and spontaneously: LOTTERY!

bitmap font homework

part one

bitmap font homework

part two

I have to confess, I didn’t fill in the crosses in every single box…Actually I just scanned one lottery ticket and 5 different crosses, saved and scaled each cross on a single layer and copied as many crosses as needed on a cropped box. This way I could try out different combinations and spare some lottery tickets (not that I would ever win anything) 🙂

in Typograhy  by Savina 0 comments