Studio Brief 1 - Visual Thinking Alphabet Soup

After collecting the research shown on my Design Context blog i started to experiment with different ways of layering different letter forms.


Experimentation

I started off drawing small examples of ways to draw layered letterforms and i decided on the 10 letters i was going to use ( shown by the highlighted letter ). After this i started to draw the ideas on tracing paper so i could use a typeface to work from. I selected some of my favourite typefaces to use, news gothic, Microsoft sans serif, furtura and helvetica. 

These are the examples i drew on tracing paper, i feel they all represent layers well, accept maybe the on shown bottom left. Although they all need to be drawn neater with cleaner crisp lines and in black pen. Id say my favourites were the lowercase and uppercase G, the Q, A and H. Because they all showcase layers the best and at the same time provide the best visual image. 
Next i put these ideas onto some decent card so i could then display them in our group crit.     


My final selection

These are my final selection of letters for the word layers, i feel each one resembles the word but some better than others. They are simple but get the point across plus providing a strong visual image. The strongest letter-form i feel is the first (letter A), because it provides a intricate design that looks effective and could be used across each letter of the alphabet. Another one i consider to be strong is the letter H, it is again a simple idea that has a strong visual aesthetic, this also will work across every other letter of the alphabet and when presented as a whole set it could look visually pleasing. The 2 ideas i thought could have worked well with a little more work are the Q and the G, the Q is a mixture of different typefaces layered on top of each other, this could work if some of them were moved around a bit, but at the moment the whole thing looks a bit jumbled up ( a bit messy ). With the letter G the idea was to have the lowercase g faded behind the uppercase G but this didn't work because we had to hand render and only use black and white so it was hard to get that faded look, i do feel that this idea could be strong if worked upon on Photoshop / illustrator. The weakest letters are the E and R, the E just gets lost with all the patterns and just looks a bit messy as whole. The R is just way too simple and boring!