This Blog post is created for the purpose of my Master’s Typo assignments, I am a designing student in an art / designing school doing my Master’s, the love for colors and illustrations and all things Art started a long time back consisting of many little journeys into learning, here is one.

Not long back we started an interesting journey along with our very enthusiastic typo teacher who managed to get online and teach us as if we were physically present with her and without whom this blog would have not been created and my fellow classmates whose critics also played a greater part, studying “Typography”, its so vast and so deep and yet as you fall into this amazing world of fonts, words and curve it gets better and better. With the help of our lovely typo teacher at art school and our enthusiasm this blog was created.

THE STARTERS 

For the starters we picked up some A3 sheets and a flat brush and some ink ( yes, i am always looking for reasons to buy new art supplies ! ), and that’s how it begun, we created different lines with all the stuff, filling sheets after sheets, Vertical, Horizontal, slant, some more slant, half circle and some full circles !

Playing with different lines and curves using a flat brush and Ink

Moving on we played some more with the ink and brush, creating ‘A to Z’, some more typo, the ‘Devanagari’ typo and redoing it a tone of times before getting it right ( Not that right but it was fun and a lot of hard work and patience )

The Pixel Font AKA Pac-Man Font

This is the coolest assignment ever to be done and it was something new which was not done before, we needed to create a Pixel font and give it a name of our own, how cool is this !

It was done in two parts – manually using a Graph paper (made in coral draw) and a Muji gel pen (my fav!) and digitally in Adobe Illustrator. Doing it digitally in Illustrator was the most difficult thing to be ever done, it took forever !

Expressive opposite words

Let’s get over with the ‘Black & white’ and add some colors ! So the next thing we did was picked some pair of opposite words, wrote it with interesting ‘self made typo’ with a touch of illustration to it using watercolors on a A3 sheet ( I know it’s boring to read a lot of text , so I would just try to make a visual conversation ) 

Designing Quotes, thoughts and proverbs

Moving on further, on the third day we started getting more creative with the words, we wrote quotes and proverbs using our style and strokes, also i went a little further by turning my hand drawn work in ink and flat brush into a digital one by using Photoshop and adding photography in the background to make it more alive. 

I tried my hands at typos from different languages i.e., Japanese and Persian, which was quite interesting !

LEARNING THE CONCEPT OF ALIGNMENT

It gets better and better, further moving to more complex tasks, the alignment of a piece of writing, this was really enjoyable and hard at the same time, the over all assignment is done in Adobe Illustrator with immense patience using three different fonts, also because I am a Proud “Potterhead” and deeply appreciate the creative and beautiful works of J.K. Rowling, I took the ‘Starting lines from the First chapter of the First book’ and then ‘The Last lines from the Last chapter of the Last book’, showing the beginning of a magical journey and as it goes on forever…

Hierarchy of Fonts

Nothing can be important than this, the hierarchy of fonts as per there origin and introduction, we talked about a lot of things up there and also had fun but lets come down to some serious business, it is very important to know the fonts and typefaces we use and come across in our daily life and who is there maker and when did they originated, this took some work, oh wait ! A lot of work, I went through a lot of blogs and articles before creating the following Hierarchy of the fonts, though many types of hierarchy can be created I settled down creating two, the process was exciting and I did found my self in a sea of information of the origin of the different fonts and its creators, how they came into existence and how fonts were develop through the ages, the origin of the very infamous “Comic sans” and the very beloved “Helvetica” and “Garamond”, its endless, lets take a look, shall we !

TYPE FACES & FONTS BY YEAR OF INTRODUCTION

TYPES OF FONTS ON THE BASIS OF SANS SERIF, SERIF & SCRIPT

CASE STUDY

STARBUCKS

The second last assignment before we went on to make posters for one of the fonts is the ‘case study’. The case study was an highly interesting one, it is when we were actually introduced to Adobe Indesign in detail, how to make columns and alignments and set images and colors and fonts and other things that Indesign has to offer, it took me a lot of time to figure out Indesign and I did not want to do this particular assignment also because it took me a lot of time to figure out the assignment itself, but as progressed it started to get smoother I made a lot of progress, made a nice three columned layout gather information and did research which took some time and started making one of my first case study layouts based on one of my absolute favourite coffee brand ‘Starbucks’ !

Starbucks, formed 1971, the 2nd biggest coffee wave in the history is one of my absolute favourite like many more around the world who adore Starbucks not just for its “out of the box’ flavours but also for its presentation and colors, the Green color represents the brand and the female sea creature is the face of the brand, the color palette changes according to the seasons and occasions, they have so much to offer for every celebration, the colors are vibrant and they have tons of flavours and the presentation and branding is exquisite, the range of accessories and coffee mugs and sippers and instant coffee packaging is just superb and they have created an interesting workplace, over the years they have created large family and expanded itself to great lengths and have definitely taught how to drink coffee, there fonts and illustrations are just speechless and absolute wonderful, they have customized there fonts and hired freelancers to create there illustrations and packaging and over all designing, there stores are lit and website is awesome, they have created a tone of work employment.

It is my absolute favourite and I adore the brand so much that I had to make the case study on Starbucks only.

I went through a lot of research and a few of rough drawings for the layout, sticking to a green color palette and a three column layout.

One of my first tries at making the layouts was a crude one with many mistakes, but it did not came out as a complete failure, I wanted to put a lot of info and had space problem and it got a bit confusing but here it is …

POSTER ON ANY ONE FONT

And then there is a point where you get the hang of it, since we were doing this for three straight weeks all we could think about was fonts and type faces, Garamond and Helvetica, we became familiar with the software, which we were new to, Indesign and Illustrator and we were doing things well, not great but well, as i said its a journey and i really don’t expect to be great at everything at one go, I enjoy the process and welcome the critics from my fellow class mates and our lovely typo teacher.

The last but not the least, our final assignment consisted of designing a poster on one of our favourity font, and because I take interest in controversies I instantly chose the one and only “Comic Sans”!

Lets take a brief about Comic Sans, can a font be controversial ?

This assignment where we need to make a poster about a particular font has been an interesting one. so as I was looking for fonts to work on for the poster, I was quit interested about one particular font, the one and only ‘Çomic Sans’. Is it good one or a bad one, the debate is never ending. Personally speaking this particular font created by Vincent Connare in 1994 by Microsoft corporation was hated by all and loved by the Dyslexia community, it was approved by the British Dyslexia association & the Dyslexia association of Ireland, but if you ask me I love the font, in fact I created a whole poster down here, and I just can’t seem to hate it.

so talking about the process, the following poster was created in Indesign and Illustrator after drawing multiple rough drawings, after that multiple posters were created in Indesign and illustrator and after some corrections told by my teacher this final poster was created. I wanted to created an interesting poster not a typical one, a one that strikes a conversation and make it alive by using a nice pastel colors to the dialogue, also I think it is a complete poster as after looking at it one can get a brief of the conversation and idea of it.