Illustrator Typeface

Choosing which letter to use was easy, as all of my letters were all very simple apart from this design, therefore, as I have used illustrator, I decided to use the most detailed and most effective letter to develop into a typeface. I first decided to make a base for all of the letters, this would make it quicker and easier.

I started by drawing a balloon that is just about to be popped. I did this by using the pen tool and then any mistakes or deformatives of the balloon, I used the white direct selection tool to re-shape.

Adding simple likes and an oval shape to look like a pin using the line segment tool and the eclipse tool. Then changing the colours to be black and white, filling in the shape with black and the outline white. Doing the opposite to this by copying the image and filling it in white with black outlines, this allows me to copy both balloons to create the pattern.

Adding the lines to split it up, making the background pattern larger than the letters just in case some letters are larger, such as a 'W'.

Tracing round Gill Sans Bold letter to get the basic shape.

Duplicating the letter so that when I use the first one as a mask I can put the second letter over the top, to get a nice thick outline.

 I then put the letter over the background pattern, and brought it to the front so that when I 'masked' the letter, you would only see the pattern as if looking through a 'B' shaped window.

 Then selecting all the information and shapes using the select tool, then you go to 'Object' down to 'Clipping Mask' and selecting make. This can also be done as a short cut by pressing 'cmd 7' at the same time and it will cut around the shape and give a 'B' shaped background patter.

Putting the second 'B' shape over the 'Masked' image gives it an outline, and make it look like a letter form rather than lots of shapes.

I thought about adding colour to my typeface, so decided to try out cyan as the brief stated we had to use CMYK. I changed the colour from white to Cyan on the background pattern, and it looked like above. I think that this looks really good and works very well, therefore applied it to a letter form to see what it looked like in use, I did this by using the same process.

Looking at the Letter form with the coloured background pattern doesn't look as effective as it does in black and white. It looks as if it would work well initially, but I think when it has been applied to the letter form it makes it look quite tacky. Although 'pop' is typically very colourful, I designed this to work as black and white as they were my initial limitations, and want to stick to them.

Using the same process I produced the rest of the alphabet, also decided to do some glyphs such as numbers and punctuation. I did this so that I could get a better idea of what it would look like if it were to be produced as a full font.

Evaluation;

With this illustrator brief I could have done more with experimenting with lower case letters, and experimented more with different colours. Although I am really impressed with the way it has printed out, it looks to be at a professional standard, and quality paper. Although I developed this typeface to work as black and white, I think that it would demonstrate 'pop' more if it was in a variance of colours, although using more than one colour makes it look tacky, therefore I think that black and white works the best.

Looking back at this brief, I have learnt a lot about illustrator therefore has helped me a lot. I have also learnt many shortcuts which make the process quicker, which meant that I could test out some different things. I think that my typeface worked well digitally, as it gives it a cleaner finish.