"Designing With Type" Design Your Name

Mr. Michael Delahunt

Graphic Design 1 & 2
The 1st
"Designing with Type" Assignment:
Design Your Name

A letterform is "The particular set of shapes seen in each individual letter of our alphabet, every one of them having characteristics that distinguish it from all the others in order to retain legibility."

The letterform of every "R" for instance must be different in a very particular way from every "P."

Type is

"In typography, a letterform produced electronically or photographically, most often with a computer. Before computers took over this function in the late twentieth century, type was a small block of metal or wood bearing a raised letter or character on the upper end that leaves a printed impression when inked and pressed on paper. This heritage has given us a huge vocabulary of terms we use in reference to type."

A typeface or font is

"the design of a full set of letterforms, numerals, punctuations and other characters unified by consistent visual qualities."

Typefaces are frequently grouped as of various distinctive kinds: as serif, sans serif, script and decorative.

Modifications in a typeface can create design variety while retaining the essential visual character of the face. These include variations in weight (light, medium, bold), width (condensed, regular, extended), and angle (roman or upright, and Italic), and other elaborations (outline, shadowed, decorative, etc.)

Historical typefaces:

Daniel Hopfer (German , c. 1470-1536), Alphabet of Capital Roman letters with metaphorical ornaments, 15th-16th century, etching, 15.6 x 22.6 cm (image) inches, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA. See ornament.

William Morris (English, 1834-1896), Initial Letters, c. 1840s, designed for Love is Enough, a book printed by Morris' Kelmscott Press, each letter 45 x 45 mm, U of Florida.

Eric Gill (English, 1882-1940), Inscription 'Ex Divina Pulchritudine', 1926, Hoptonwood stone relief, 30.6 x 45.7 x 3.8 cm, Tate Gallery, London. This Latin inscription of capital letters is an aphorism meaning, "The beauty of God is the cause of the being of all that is."

16 capital letters of a late 20th century font.

Contemporary examples:

Commonworld, letters that are distressed and partly missing. Available from Fontscape.com. See implied and lacuna.

Modell Envelo, a font with a jittery high-tech mood. Available from Fontscape.com.

Snowgoose Back Front, a two-color font suggesting a European chilly mood. Available from Fontscape.com.

Yokkmokk, a nearly illegible font with a playful science-fiction flavor. Available from Fontscape.com.

Resources concerning typography:

FontSite. Find articles of interest to fontographers, typographers and graphic artists, rules of typography, The Production Artist Survivial Guide, and a few free downloadable fonts.

Along with visuals (drawings, photographs, diagrams, patterns, textures, etc.), type is a major ingredient in graphic design. Type can also be the visual itself, and can express the entire message. By designing the type to look cramped, to follow a curve, to break apart in some way, or to take on any of a zillion other characteristics can help to communicate a message in much more than a stricly verbal way.

Your assignment is to type your first and last name in a variety of ways, arriving finally at three designs that visually convey your personality:

Using Adobe Illustrator, on one page create a layout in which your name (first and last, with middle name optional) is displayed 30 times, each time using a different typeface (font), sizing each at 16-24 points. Label each example with the name of the typeface, and the size.
Using Adobe Illustrator, along one edge of another page record three to five adjectives that describe your personality. Using the rest of the same page, make three designs for your name using typefaces that express your personality or spirit especially well.
Give carefull consideration to the positive and negative shapes within and between the letters. Make the proportions, textures, values, and directions of the letters important to each design. You are free to alter the look of your name by varying typefaces, weights, color, pattern, background color or texture, direction of the letters, and different sizes -- within any line of text.

Deadline: end of class January 25.
Print these two pages. Label them with your full name and class period on the front side of each page, and hand them in by the end of class Friday, January 25. One fifth of the points you can earn are for turning an assignment in by its deadline.

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ArtPage has thousands of articles about art terms used in art production, art criticism, art history, aesthetics, and art education. I created ArtPage for my students, to help them increase their understanding of art concepts, readings, writings, and conversations. Some of the hyperlinks found on the pages about my elementary art program will take you to ArtPage articles about terms on these pages.

I have taught art at three elementary schools in the Paradise Valley Unified School district (northeastern Phoenix and north Scottsdale) from 1986-. I began publishing information about my classes on the Web in 1995. I taught at Pinnacle High School during the 2001-2002 school year, and posted these lessons that year. I will maintain them as time permits.

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