Here I will show you my results from the first two tasks
Here are the sketches for the first alphabet. I used a variety of shapes I found interesting from this reference, these were the rounded rectangles and the jagged boxes. My favourite letter from this sketch is the letter A because it looks interesting but it is not too abstract that it is hard to recognise the letter, it also uses subtle shapes from the reference that work together nicely. However the rest of the alphabet I found hard to work with, the shapes worked well for one off letters however as a whole font it is too abstract for even a display font and is impractical to use.
This reference I found the most difficult to interpret and take influence from. There was little shapes of interest however I managed to highlight the thunderbolt shape and also the bold rectangles which decorate the border of the poster. Right from the start I found that these shapes were not working as letters, the thunderbolts and bold squares did not fit well together and were better off being two separate typefaces. If I had to take this typeface forward I would like to create two sets of glyphs for each letter, one influenced by the bold squares and the other by the thunderbolts, this way the end user can combine them in whatever way they wish, or even choose to use just one set. However I can not see this typeface working so I will not be taking it forward.
Straight away I knew that I would use circles for this typeface. I thought a simple circular typeface with a thick stroke would be readable and make a bold and simple display face. And so I started on the initial letters ANESG; the ANE and G were quite simple however the S was a huge challenge. Is seemed impossible to fit a letter usually made out of two circles into one large circle, especially since it needs a thick stroke to fit with the others. The thick stroke and condensed space allowed little to no room for the white space needed to construct the letter. I initially came up with an idea to scrap the one circle structure for this one letter and make it traditionally using two, this looked good however as I thought it did not fit with the other letters so it had to be scrapped. I then looked back at the E and how it was structured, and by using a similar cross bar I created two curves, one on the bottom and one on the top of the circle and I connected them with a crossbar same to the letter E. This created a legible and contemporary S, but more importantly it created an S which fit within the circular structure and so fit in with the remaining letters. Once I had the first five letters sketched I then did a very rough sketch of the rest of the alphabet. I only did a very rough sketch to get a sense of how the letters would look, it was quick enough to allow me to do a few variations of some letters when they did not look right, drawing them in too much detail would waste time. Once I had this rough sketch down I then worked one drawing the first 10 or so letters neatly on graph paper. I plan not only to draw the whole alphabet up neat on graph paper, but to also draw them on Illustrator as I am already experienced with designing type, especially with a circular structure.
