2w + 3t = 1t + r3

Friday. Good ol' Friday. End of the working week and also the end of an on-going two week brief that has required me to design a typeface (A to Z including the glyphs ! ? £ @ : .) to represent the personalities traits of my given partner. This being the arguably unlucky Lauren.

After some initial interviewing the words that I felt described Lauren most accurately were cynical, devious, good-hearted, hard-working, indecisive, informed, messy, pessimistic, vacant and in a somewhat light-hearted manner; alcoholic. Naturally all of these words didn't fit together in a nice coherent and non-contradictory manner; so I divided them into separate groups that I thought would allow for the best outcome in the long run.

Working with the resultant notion of a "messy and vacant alcoholic" I got to work on some of my immediate ideas involving a hands-on approach with stencils and Indian ink. The base font I chose to develop my unique typeface from was Helvetica in it's boldest format. This was selected in order to convey the bold, out going and 'in your face' side of a happy alcoholic.


Although these results proved successful on many levels, I opted to continue the progression of my ideas through digital means. In doing so, I defined a series of brush presets that allowed me to create a more uniformed font; a font that achieved a sustained house style if you like. This is what I settled with...


From here I took my work into my crit session looking for some supportive feedback and ultimately some outside opinions on what needed to be improved and perhaps developed further. It was suggested that I needed to convey the sense of 'vacant' on the same level as the other two traits and to also experiment with what materials I decided to portray 'messy' and 'alcoholic' through. Back to the drawing board I went.

With this feedback in mind, I set out solving the problems raised within the crit. I got a coffee. I got a fine liner, and off I went; to the lightbox that is. I decided to see what could be achieved through contouring my pre-existing typeface as in my own mind this would directly portray a sense of vacant. The letter forms themselves would be empty inside and I would be left with a hollow shell. Perfect. I additionally wanted to make a conscious use of the negative space within the counters and bowls to distance my typeface from the norm and to also gain an even stronger correlation to the word messy via an abstract approach. This time I thought I had something that worked.




However, as I could only produce one finalised typeface design I opted to go with the contoured series of letter forms as I felt they worked more cohesively as a whole and would be much more readable in a bigger body of text. As a result, I spent the next couple of hours honing the presentation of all of the letters an altering some of the ones that I wasn't particularly happy with; i.e the J and the G which either looked awkward to the eye or were purely not legible enough.

Once completed my next port of call was to produce the deliverables stated within the brief; a name badge for my partner and an A1 sheet of trace that housed my entire alphabet in one uniformed space.




In regards to the name badge I chose to present Laurens name as the abbreviated and slightly informal 'Loz'. This was done in reflection to the alcoholic trait that has many informal connotations attached to it and also because it just worked. It sounded messy, vacant and alcoholic all in one.

Come the final crit, Lauren was largely pleased with what I had produced in regards to her personality traits and said that I had reflected her character well; despite the claims in front of our group that she was in no way, shape or form an alcoholic. Brilliant! On a more serious note though, it was pointed out that the outline of my letter forms could be weighted heavier as to stand out more from a distance. Alternatively I could produce my typeface as white on black in the future which would similarly give out a strong, contrasting finish. Not bad at all then!


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