The Alphabet, SAYURI
THE BRIEF
For my first session at BillyBlue design college, my major assessment is to design an original alphabet. It will be displayed on an A3 portrait poster featuring the name of my alphabet and relevant information.
I created this blog for inspiration, research and the evolution of my alphabet.
INTIAL IDEAS
For my alphabet, my initial idea is to create illuminated letter forms inspired from Heena art. As a professional artist in the field, incorporating heena art to letter was very challenging, heena art is curvy, bold, each element in the design follows each other, so in type, ignoring that particular element was like working with a design that doesnt seem right. But as i progressed with one, two letters, i actually found it very interesting, but it was time consuming and since i was on a time budget, i decided to move on from this idea and work with a simpler design. I have to admit it looks very beautiful, and if i get more time in the future, i would continue evolving this design
Heena inspired Letter forms
This was playing with curves in type, more i look at it, more i seem to hate it. It just looks wrong. Hopefully i can come up with wacky ideas :)
This is again playing with lines and curves. Trying to create rigid type. This was an idea that could have evolved to something fantastic, for now its not what i had in mind.
Moving away with the idea of creating a sans serif font, i decided to try a serif font, with a classic feel to it. It is weird, like the letter h looks squashed.
Reverse font Being a bit more playful, It does'nt make any sense to me though, no idea if this would work or not, i dont think it does, but it could be simplified further.
This inspired from water drops. its very cute, and probably would look cool if it was 3d font, with the effects of drops, bubbles coming in and out of the tails of the letterforms.
This is based on my own handwriting, so am sure it would be called a script font or handwriting font, or it could be both.
Final Refinement
This kind of type sort of reminds me of junior school, when back home in Kenya, in school, we had handwriting classes and we would write in this kind of long l's and t's. They were rules how you should write each letter, and i guess this font comes about from that idea. The o brings out q, g, a, b, d, c, so each letter comes from each other. Working from here, i then worked with vectors using Illustrator (software). I like this font. Its simple and a bit fancy with the long elevated tails, and works for this particular brief, and it could be commercialized.
My final lowercase alphabet in vector form.Am quite happy with it. Needs a bit of modification here and there, but this is it.
Final Uppercase alphabet. It was inspired from the lowercase, like the o, f, l, etc which were pretty much the same and building up from there created the entire alphabet.
I am having this has my main center characters. They show different sizes of the alphabet.
I named my alphabet Sayuri, meaning lilies, my alphabet has nothing to do with lilies, but i like the name. Its sort of innocent and depicts a naive personality, like my alphabet does. Having the background of the poster in a subtle color also gives it a bit of sophiticated look.
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