Studio Brief 02 - Evaluation

The brief was to design a bespoke typeface based on one of Müeller-Brockmanns classic and lead typefaces using an adjective of our choice. I was quite intimidated by this task at first as I had never done anything of the sort and was still relatively new to typography however knew that it did interest me. So after a fair bit of research into the different typefaces I settled on Bodoni, with the aim of creating a majestic edition; the context I had in mind was high end luxury brands and magazines so I designed it as a display typeface rather than being suitable for a body of text. This task most definitely pushed me to build on my Adobe Illustrator skills, and I have seen a massive improvement myself since the start of this module from for example the ligature task I didn’t even try to use it, rather tried my best on Photoshop. I have enjoyed playing around with the glyphs as individuals, with their different  shapes and strokes as well as on a whole with the characters adding up to an alphabet. I really enjoyed using sketches to show what I wanted to do with this one and be able to explore possible options with out going straight into digital and being stuck around the same idea with just slight variations; this has really helped me recognise how useful a sketchbook can be and will definitely continue to use one in the future - this was further enforced by an interview I saw with Rudd studio. The final decision was to create a font in upper-case as I thought this most appropriate for display, I believe the letters flow well next to one another and are interesting to look at; as well as being majestic and something to be trusted, followed and admired. I named the font ‘Bodoni Bracket’ as fundamentally you could still tell it is Bodoni, it is already quite a regal and majestic font so the brackets are the main difference and I believe that subtlety is the key in some cases. I have learnt during this project it is okay to experiment with the characteristics of a typeface in a subtle or drastic way, whatever fits what you’re trying to achieve, this will allow me in the future to adjust typefaces to fit a specific purpose. In terms of what I could have done differently, I would research more other designers who have changed and manipulated typefaces and see how they did it, what tools they used.