All lucked out... Fire Do Or Kee P Shut

So for the past week it seems as if my fate has been decided by the dreaded creation known as The Randomiser; a terrifying machine designed to completely shake up a students life and claim their soul just when they thought it was safe... With this in mind Monday morning saw the birth of a new briefing; Alphabet Soup. This required the creation of 10 brand new letter forms at an A6 resolution, all of which had to convey our own interpretation on the word that we 'luckily' plucked from the jaws of the Randomiser. My word turned out to be 'Duplicate'...

"That which exactly resembles or corresponds to something else; another correspondent to the first; hence, a copy; a transcript; a counterpart."

Not so bad really?

So after a few coffee's (as standard) and a succulent bacon butty, I cleared my head and got to work on drafting up some initial ideas that I hoped may develop into some ground breaking design.



Off the bat I primarily decided that I wanted to work with the letter C as I thought it had a sufficient amount of potential to develop other letter forms from and also because I was truly sick to the back teeth of working with the letters 'L' and 'O'. Some might say I was off to a good start.

However, things took a turn for the worst when Thursdays workshop marked the return of the Randomiser; 'Hexagon and Square' was my lucky pick of the day. With this I firstly had to visually record my findings from around the college and subsequently present them on the wall of fame along with everyone else's coveted treasure; I was pretty taken back at how much work was produced within a simple 20 minute exercise. (A sample of my own observations can be seen in the lower image).



From here the fate of the Randomiser truly set in when we were briefed to create our own printed alphabet made up of only the two shapes we had selected earlier within the session. Low 5. Despite this, I similarly got to work with drafting up some immediate ideas and eventually produced what I consider to be a pretty good effort given the short amount of time. I have also included some of my favourites that were devised by other students below.





Anyway, back to the soup...

Come Friday I had progressed with my ideas and discarded the ones that were in danger of becoming polished turds. All was well. I had a variety of solutions ranging from literal stencil duplications and mirroring, to working with letter forms created by impacting one letter onto another. So with this, I set about producing my final 10 responses to present on the wall of fame.






In the end I felt pretty accomplished with what I had achieved as I managed to explore a range of ideas that I would never have normally chosen to have done; especially if I had not been given this brief. Never-the-less my crit feedback suggested that some of my letter forms presented an unclear interpretation of my given word and could have easily been created in response to terms such as dissect, edit, layer, copy or hybrid. As a result, should I be able to modify my ideas in future instances I would make a specific effort to address this aspect and build upon my letter forms giving them a more clear and concise purpose.

Either way, the final wall looked like this. Enjoy.


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