Posts Tagged ‘ letterforms ’
Since there was quite a bit of interest in my initial post about constructing letters, I thought it a good idea to provide the remaining letters and how they are constructed . Isn’t the letter Q beautiful?
Although these letterforms are based on the carvings from the Roman era, the Romans did not utilize certain letters which are in common use today. There was no J, U or W.
I featured spreads from Green Source magazine recently. And the current issue contains a few spreads with letterforms that I haven’t seen before.
These letters remind me of an assignment we do at UB where the students are asked to create letterforms for a logotype. I frequently see solutions similar to these letters. The basic shape is a black square, and by clever use of white shapes, like smaller squares or triangles, individual letters can be created fairly quickly.
There’s a nice typographic pun in the first spread that would be worth highlighting even if there was nothing else of interest on these pages.
A detail from the second spread
This is often a fun exercise. Finding everyday objects that look like type but are not typefaces frequently leads to surprising design solutions.
Several years ago I was working on an annual report for a food company and I used string beans to make initial capital letters.
V and F are really easy to make from string beans. And amazingly, and only now do I see the coincidence of these two letters. The company I was working for was Vie de France.
There are a few complete alphabets in the examples below but even the individual objects that were photographed by the class may become the start of an entire alphabet in the future.
I love this page from French Vogue. The drama of the large type is a fine example of how to create a visual statement with the raw material of the typographer.
Cropping the letterforms to the very edge of the page is more powerful (my revision, center), creating tension with the page edge and activating the space around the outside of the letterforms. This way the letters are not floating in the center of the page, instead the edge of the page and the shape of the letters create new, clearly defined new shapes, like the triangle of white in the upper right.
For the record, the original spread is at the end.
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | ||
type eh? 