Alphabet soup 2 - For a partner

This week the brief is to design a typeface... 26 letters and glyphs based on a fellow classmate.

To get a better idea of what my partner (Chris Ando) was about... we were given a quiz comprising of 10 questions from 'The Guardian'.

What is your earliest memory?
Building towers out of bricks in my back garden

Which living person do you most admire?
Tom Yorke - for his lyrics

What is your most precious possession?
My ipod

What superpower would you have?
Invisibility

What extinct creature would you bring back to life?
A woolly mammoth

Who would play you in the film of your life?
Jim Carey

Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?
Jim Carey... again.

What makes you unhappy?
Windy weather

What would you get dressed-up as at a fancy-dress party?
A cowboy

Which phrase do you most over-use?
'innit'


Then I added a few more questions as I didn't feel i could get as much as i could out of the given questions...

What is your favorite colour?
Orange

What is your favorite type of music?
Dubstep and Drum & Bass

Do you have any special character traits?
Real perfectionist

I then decided on 4 words to narrow down my ideas... they were...

• orange
• dubstep
• cowboy
• perfectionist

I decided to investigate different typefaces which were associated with Dubstep and Drum & Bass. I collected flyers, looked at posters and checked out some websites. I sumized that all of the fonts looked pretty similar. They were all upper-case, bold and sans-serif.
I picked a few fonts off the internet and played around with them to see which would look best with the orange i was going to add to it. I decided on a font called 'Zealot'.
I then tried to find different ways to add orange... removing borders and changing the edges.

When we had the crit... Fred said "So you basically downloaded a font and coloured it in"

After that slight embarrassment, i decided to take the project in an entirely different direction. I appreciated that I had not followed the brief and manipulated the typeface.
This time i decided to go with the fact he would like to dress up as a cowboy and was a perfectionist.

I looked into what made 'Perfect' and thought the idea that models... who are generally seen as perfect... had to have symmetrical faces to make the cut.
I decided to look at different cowboy patterns, found on the guns, chaps, spurs, saddles and boots and see if i could manipulate type made up of those patterns, made symmetrical.
It didn't quite work out the way I wanted it to...

So, once again i sat there and thought of what else was associated with cowboys... and came up with lasso's and ropes.
I ended up creating the letterforms out of ropes of different thicknesses and creating serifs out of freyed ends.
I used a western-style font called 'Oklahoma'.