The Summer Brief

The Summer Brief

The summer brief for me was a real challenge, but a brilliant challenge. Coming from a Fine Art based background, I had never really tackled a typographic project as such so naturally I was initially a bit stuck. I brainstormed my ideas right away and came up with the idea to focus on specific aspects in my life which you could say define me as a creative person. I am massively into photography, in particular photographing urban environments which surround me. So I decided to run with the idea of representing myself through my own photographs of the place I was born and raised in and the place that I love; London. I looked to take photos which present the urban environment in an abstract, geometric way, I took over 60 images so that I would have enough to play around with and use at least two images per letter form. The images below are samples of the primary photography.

 I then narrowed down the images so that I had 52 to experiment with. I used Photoshop to set up 10cm x 10cm canvases and got to work editing the imagery. I wanted to create 'tiles' to extract a letter from. I wanted the tiles to be dynamic and portray the way I see and enjoy the city.

I then cut out the alphabet from the 26 tiles, using the Sans Serif font Myriad Pro. It is one of my favourite type faces as it is sleek and complimented the bold geometric patterns found in the photography produced. I experimented with inverting the letters which produced some nice results, but I ended up sticking with the pure monochrome letters. 

I received positive feedback in the crit. People said they liked how simple the concept behind my alphabet was and how they appreciated the running theme throughout the set of letters. They said it could have been more successful if I had perhaps introduced some colour or had attempted to create the alphabet by hand rather than using an existing type face. I took the comments on board and was pleased with the feedback provided.