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Hi, I just wanted to take a second and talk about the second assignment.
I'm sure you've had some questions about it. You're going to take two
letter forms and overlap them on top of each other.
Part of
working for is an interesting figure/ground relationship. One of those letters should be the
ground
and the other letter should act as the figure, on top of that first letter's ground.
So there's some rules to keep in mind.
The letters have to be flatly colored. Either black or white,
you can't split the design or add artificial geometry,
and you can't distort the letter forms. You can't stretch them out from what they are originally.
You can close up any counters. Counters are the little holes in the letter forms.
So you can close those if you get a better figure/ground relationship.
You can also take the edge of a letter and extend it to the edge of the page, if that makes sense.
To increase more ground.
But what I wanted to do today is show you the importance of the
planning and doing some thumbnails. A lot of times when people start thumbnails
they don't get a lot out of it because they are doing them improperly.
So I wanted to show you a series I have drawn with each one an improving thumbnail for this project.
So I'm going to show you those and give you an idea
of what
cropping around a letterform can do in terms of
it's figure ground relationship.
Now here I've just taken the letter 'A' and on the left I've
surrounded it by ground,
and on the right I've cropped in a bit. Now notice how
the one on the right it's a little more active.
We start to notice the negative space around the letter a in addition to the letter
itself. That's really helpful.
Down below
i've now filled in
that ground, black,
or you know sketch lines
and the figure is white. By reversing this it increases the ambiguity between what's
background and what's foreground.
Those little black triangles become aware of
almost as figures. We can still understand this is an 'A' you know there's enough information
being provided that we can still see this as an 'A' but we're also noticing you know the
the
the shapes, the negative space as well as the positive space. A great designer will provide
both those things. Good strong
negative and positive relationships.
In this last piece
I just rotated and that's acceptable for this project. Notice how by rotating within
that space it becomes a little more interesting to look at.
You may not do that with all of yours but that's a that's a good thing to try.
Just by taking and tilting it. Again you can't stretch the letter forms you can scale them up and down
uniformly.You can't stretch them but you can rotate them and flip them.
If you do that you can get some pretty interesting looking design.
If you notice the triangle on the upper left-hand corner it now really starts
to take off and have an interesting relationship with the counter of the 'A.'
What I've drawn here at the top
are just some examples of thumbnail drawings that I get from students from time to time.
I've drawn them myself but,
in this
particular project we just have two letter forms- we have no structure of the
the format of the page.
You can see it doesn't really give you much to work with. We just have a couple of letter
forms and the relationship is really minimal. We have no idea what fonts are being
used or figure ground other than just the stick figure.
In this next that have improved a little bit by just taking the same drawings
and drawing a little bit of format.
You can see here now at least we start to get an idea of how these letters are going to
fit in the space.
Figure/ground really hasn't been established yet but we get a sense of boundaries and cropping.
So figure/ground
it's stronger just in that it's surrounded.
On this next set
i've drawn out the letters just as kind of spaces rather than as lines so
that we get a sense of spacial use on the page.
As we look at this look at how 'AW' all of a sudden it doesn't fit in there.
By the way as I'm drawing these rectangles I'm trying to keep them the proportion of the assignments.
So in this case, eight by ten.
And we start to get a better understanding of how things will fit together the K and H for example.
The other issue with this is that this assignment you're supposed to use
three different types of fonts from the serif category: old style, transitional, or
modern.
Obviously this line doesn't show that so down in the next example, basically
the same sketches I did above,
but now I've put on of some little serifs and and and still kind of experimenting with
this.
Some of these are starting to look good and some of them aren't going to work.
Lets drop down again
next set. So this is the next set where there's
a little bit of improvement. Notice that the thumbnails have gotten progressively bigger.
You don't have that huge ones. The one's that we're looking at right now about an inch and
a quarter by an
inch.
Notice that I'm starting to take the letter forms then and since I've drawn the thumbnail
a little more intentionally. I've been trying to get that particular kind of serif
typeface, I can really start to think about how these letters will work together or not work together.
So for the E and the Z, I'm now trying to figure out a figure ground relationship
where on will be the figure
against the ground of the other one.
Notice that I just drop the K and H because they seem too similar.
So I introduced a round character with a character with some straight stands.
So we start to get a a pretty good idea now of a figure/ground relationships but the thumbnails
I'd like to see you do is actually filled in.
If you fill it in then you get a good idea of of whether it's going to work or not, because now
we really see whether the A and the B are going to work together. Is there enough information for your
mind to close up that B.
We're really using the Gestalt theory of closure. We're also doing that with the letter A.
We're cropping it off enough
to make it interesting but hopefully we're leaving enough so that the Gestalt of closures
still happens and we understand that it's an A.
Your goal is to make some interesting combinations of letter forms where we can still understand
the two letters. I don't know if that's happening with E and the Z here.
Here's the E and Z. Notice that I think a lot of what makes this is interesting is the line
relationship. When it moves to shape
it's a little harder to understand.
But that's the requirement. It has to be just shapes not lines.
Here's the E and H
and I found something interesting, you know the stem of the E, bring across the
H but I raise it up just a little bit so that i can now have the crossbar of
the H as well as the crossbar of the E.
Also notice the cropping. The H is now tucked in right up against the edge of this
shape.
Again here's the R and the O
to get us a little closer to this design.
This project acts a bit like a precursor to logo development.
You can think about lettering that you're building
and if you put them together in interesting ways you can really come up with some
cool logos with just letters.
While you're doing this, its tedious and you're having to spend time filling in, and maybe you're
erasing, and it doesn't have to be perfect-these are these aren't letter perfect-
but what it does do
is it gives you time to think
and as you're drawing these things out
things will come into your mind. You know for instance the K and the H. On the computer
you just sit there and arrange these two guys and arrange these two, and maybe you're happy because
you finish the project. But it might not look very good.
As I was drawing this, I was spending so much time on it that I was like the K and H
just isn't working. I need a round form to go with the verticals, and that's
where the H and the E came from.
And then as I was drawing it a second time and shading it, I thought of the cross bar
idea. Elevating the E enough. Also notice how the E dips down right where the serifs come
at the bottom of the H
and indicate that curve, so we get it to do two things at once.
Those kinds of things you think about when you're drawing just because it takes time.