I started with presenting the more obvious ideas towards my word (grotesque), and the feedback that I received was that people really enjoyed the decorative ideas:
These ideas were what first came to mind when I thought about the word. I also presented this ideas in the interim crit hand drawn, and they got lots of good feedback. I was restricted with colour (which is some of the feedback that I had in my interim crit), as we are only allowed to make our final letter-forms in black and white. I really like these designs and I think that they covey the message of the word really well, but with the restrictions of working with vector graphics and working within a grid, I'm not sure I would be able to fit the criteria of the brief while still making a really good design.
My next idea is also decorative, but have more context. I researched into gothic architecture (as that is seen as quite grotesque) and I designed the letter O in the form of a glass window:
This design was inspired by this image, taking ideas from the circular window:
Although I really like this idea, it is very complicated, and working with the restrictions of the grid, again, I feel like I won't be able to fit to the brief with this and I would find it hard to fit to other letter-forms.
My next decorative idea was taken from the definition of grotesque to be something that is bizarre and strange. I came up with this design:
In each letter-form I have incorporated a face and made the letter look quite busy, and lots going on with no main feature. I think this works well with the word and I also took inspiration from a piece in a book called Creative Lettering by Jenny Doh, and the lettering is by Andy Ainger:
The overall response to this design was that people liked it and found it really interesting, though I'm not sure if I would like to take it through to studio brief 2 as it would be quite difficult to make overall and I don't know if I would have time to make any more letters other than just uppercase.
My final decorative ideas was quite rushed and doesn't really fit the theme of my word. I wanted to try and incorporate the idea of circus freaks to my designs, but I felt that would be quite complex and would take too much time, so I decided that I could just use the circus tent to imply that. I don't think it has worked how I intended and I don't think I will be carrying this idea forward:
My next ideas were more to do with changing the structure of the actual typeface, rather than adding to it. I looked into some meanings of grotesque and one that kept occurring was the idea of animal/human hybrids. I didn't want to incorporate this as an idea into my work, as it would have been more decorative, but I did use it in other ways:
The first idea is the combination of serif and sans-serif. As futura is already a sans-serif typeface, it was quite easy to just add on the serifs. Some feedback that I got was that the serifs on some of the letter-forms, most noticeably the W, looked quite forced, and this made them feel quite uncomfortable as a designer. I think that feedback was very useful because for something to be grotesque, it does make you feel quite uncomfortable. This was one of my favourite ideas as it's quite simple and could be used as body text too.
My next idea was a combination of fill and outline. This idea doesn't really scream "grotesque" at me, because it's quite simple and I haven't really changed the letter-form much.
I also looked into "Grotesk" typefaces as they are super sans-serif, so I tried to incorporate that into my design, and make futura look more condensed and simple:
I think I could have taken this idea further by taking off the sharp edges on some of the letters and making them more rounded and easier to read.
Another few ideas that I came up with was to do with making the designer feel uncomfortable. I asked a few of my peers what would make them feel uncomfortable, and someone said that if there was something slightly "off" about the letter, so I decided to look at imperfection, and created these designs:
With each letter-form there is something slightly wrong, and I think that this is something that would make people, especially designers feel uncomfortable.
My other idea for this was to experiment with the weighting of the letters and make them all very different:
Simon said this one was one of his favourites, and I think its one of the more interesting of my desings.
I didn't get much feedback about my non-decorative designs, but I think the combination of serif and sans-serif design is my favourite. Some feedback that I got from someone outside of the crit was that I could combine some of my other ideas (gothic architecture) with this idea and make the serifs pointy and decorative, so I have the best of both worlds. I think that I'm going to take that idea forward, and make minor changes in my ideas and combine them together to make a slightly altered version.
Overall I have found this crit useful and I now have an idea of what I'm going to take forward to studio brief 2.
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