As frame research I went into a variety of shops to look at the change in designs of backing paper to diferent target audiences.

 First I went into Urban Outfitters which has a target audience of 18-30 years old. They have used vibrant colours to catch the eye of a buyer. The overpowering colours draw so much attention it isn'y initially clear what the dimensions of the frame are. They have a 'paper cut-out' style to them which makes them look home-made and reckless. This is a style that appeals to a young audience. The vibrant, clashing colours also appeals to a young audience. The general theme of the design is rough, loud and rebellious.

The design below was found in TK Max. It's a design that's aimed at making the audience want to capture beautiful moments of life like the example shown. The 'vintage' (sepia) look they've given to the photo gives the impression that it is quite an old photo of a good memory. In general the design is promoting nostalgia within photos. The design is aimed at 20+ years old people that want to use the frame for photos from a holiday or place they have traveled. I can see this being aimed at people on their gap-year.

The design below was also found in TK Max. It is aimed at a young target audience ranging from 6-12. The use of cars suggests it is aimed at young boys, as stereotypically this is what they are interested in. The use of solid, bright colours that clash with the black makes the designs stand out to the target audience and fits with the bright green frame. In my opinion, the choice of font for the dimensions of the frame don't fit the design, but it may be aimed at the parents as they are the ones who will probably be buying it and filling it.

The design below was also found in TK Max. It is aimed at an older audience than the others. The frame is quite classy, golden with traditional detailing. The frame filler is designed appropriately, with  serif fonts, and script fonts which adds a sense of class to the design. It is very simplistic. The background is a subtle fabric texture which looks like it belongs to a suit, which is often associated with high-end products.

All the designs below were found in Clas Ohlsen, a company that's whole brand guidelines are plain and modern The use of pictures of family photos and children suggests that these designs aimed at parents.

The sepia frame fillers below suggest that the owner uses the photos for reminiscent photos. They are possibly aimed at people who travel. 

The rest of the Clas Olsen designs are variations of the one below. Very minimalistic with a very light weight font to have a modern feel to them.

Yesterday, we had an interim crit for our partnered task. We laid our work out and had others anonymously crit our work and write down information for us on an A2 piece of paper.

These are some of the more useful pieces of information I received:

1. "Good experimentation, but a lack of explanation makes it hard to interpret. Some of the developments are more fun and informal, which i'm unsure if it works with the fairly wide letter spacing. You highlighted wide letter spacing as something important, so I would suggest you stay away from the more informal developments. I'm unsure of what effect Molly's handwriting has on your development, but it suits the theme that you need to convey."
2. "Although your work is difficult to interpret the letters you have designed show promising features. I think you were right to have a more curved, smooth, serif font as this best fits Molly's personality It would be good to see more variations following some of our other ideas."
3. "The way you have gone into a lot of detail as to why you have chosen certain aspects is promising, however the pointed ends on your letterforms can look a bit mean. Possibly look into diferent ways people's hand writing finishes letters. This may help maintain the friendly and open tone you are trying to convey."
4. "It's really effective how you have changed the line weight digitally with Moll'y hand writing. Try adding more characteristics to the letterforms to give it even more personality."
5. "Molly is friendly and definitely an extrovert. A bolder font definitely shows this."

The main points I plan to address are:

1. The fact that the letterforms personality is hard to interpret.
2. The pointed ends of my main design gives of a mean vibe.
3. The line weight could be used to show her as an extrovert.

In the illustrator induction we looked at the different tools at our disposal in illustrator in the tool bar. We had previously looked at how the black pointer can control a whole object whereas the white pointer can control a single anchor point. The lasso is an easy select tool for multiple anchor points. We briefly looked into the paintbrush tool as well as the pencil tool and the differences between them. With cmd + y we found that you can see objects in outline mode and use the eraser tool to draw with negative space.

We looked into how brushes change the stroke of a brush and the how to find the many many types of brushes inside illustrator.

We then went on to look at how we can create our own brushes for the brush palet by simple dragging anything we have created into the brush palet. A screenshot of the settings we can change are bellow. 

Scatter brush makes multiple copies of your brush design and scatters them along the line, whereas the art brush stretches the design to fit the shape of the line.

 Below is the align tool which can be used to align objects to either the art board or each other. This can be very useful when trying to create very exact designs.

We also looked at the layer tab that groups objects on invisible layers and either lock or hide them. The when clicking on an object you can see which layer it is on by the colour that outlines it. You can change this colour by double clicking on the layer in the layer tab.

Today I spoke with Molly a bit more to see if there was any more information about her that would help me create a typeface that represents her personality. She told me about here interest in tattoos, especially typographic ones. 

I briefly looked into the diferent sales of typographic tattoos. There are 2 main types: Scripts styled lettering, and Blackletter styled lettering. I took inspiration from some of Hydro74's work and the methods used to create Blackletter letterforms

Hydro74's Warlock font

The sketches below were a few ideas I was contemplating using. Feedback shows that the first letter design was the most popular style that suited Molly. I believe the Blackletter and tattoo style is quite heavy and gothic, which doesn't suit Molly's personality, although I feel although there are a few elements of it in the first design. 

To create a blackletter, wide nib styled letter I drew the letter form with two pencils celotaped together and filled the space in between them with a sharpie. I like this style as the contrast of thick and thin line stroke ads quite an animate feel to the letters. This reflects Molly's personality quite well as she is quite confident and talkative.

One of the things that Molly brought up in the "getting to know each other quiz" was that she loves the seaside. I wanted to experiment with some letters to see if I could make them resemble a wave, although it isn't visually pleasing at all. I also progressed the more popular curvy design to see how the style would be consistent throughout the alphabet.

Below is a more obvious design idea but I thought it was worth experimenting. Molly really likes dogs, so I traced gill sans and gave it a fluffy look to resemble a dog. I'm not so fond of this concept as it is too obvious and it doesn't reflect her personality enough.

I also briefly looked into how I could use molly's handwriting in this project. I scanned her handwriting in and tidied it up and manipulated it slightly. The curvy letterforms look quite innocent and friendly which represents Molly's personality quite well, although the thin stroke looked quite childish, like comic sans. I chose to add a contrast in stroke width to see how it looked. Feedback showed that people preferred this and that it popped out more, expressing the fact that she is an extravert. The serifs on the letterforms were purely for experimentation and did not give off any wanted characteristics.

The designs below are some quick mock-ups for the 3 designs that I hose to take forward from Task 1. I plan to get feedback from other students to see which one works best in a digital format.

Feedback in the Task 1 final crit showed that the design below expressed the word "method" best. I encountered a few problems when creating this in illustrator. 1. The stroke on certain parts of letters were too thin the have a line with arrows on the end. They just looked like stars. 2. I wasn't sure whether to square of curved angles like I have done in the "D" or combine my circle design with it slightly and have red circles on the serifs.

Below is the same design with a grid. I plan to make the grid lighter in colour and maybe just have in inside the letter.

Below is a  the beginning of a mock-up of the circle design which I have previously created.  This concept is interesting on certain letters, although some letters like "i" , "r", "v" and "l" lack interest. The original design is underneath it for reference, to see where this design is heading.

^ original design ^

There were a few design issues with arrow concept that I came up with too. The mock-up below shows that the concept doesn't fit well with certain letterforms. The "E" and "F" are the two ways that I came up with to illustrate the arms as arrows.

I plan to get feedback on these designs tomorrow so that I have time to work on just one design for the deadline.

We began the class by looking at the idea that although an A is simply 3 lines, we know to interpret it as the letter and sound. This is the case with all the letters, but it's interesting that there is such a variety of typefaces that bend our existing knowledge of the letterforms, but we can still interpret it. We as human beings have been taught from a young age that the letters have their meanings, whereas in reality it is just a group agreement that they have those meanings. All that is necessary for any language to exist is an agreement between a group of people.

For our Design Principles lesson we were told to bring "abcxyz" in uppercase and lowercase of 3  very diferent fonts. Below are previews of the 3 fonts I chose.

Haettenschweiler

I chose Haettenschweiler Because its a very condensed font and isn't likely to be used as a body copy as it has such a huge impact when large.

Times New Roman

I chose Time New Roman because of how diferent it is to Haettenschweiler; The serifs, the line stroke, geometry etc.

Futura

I chose Futura as it looks as though it is the mixture of the 2 above fonts. The line stroke is consistent throughout, the geometry of the letterforms are quite similar to Times New Roman and Futura has the same impact that Haettenschweiler does.

We were set the task of organising our fonts into categories of how they originated. Stone, Sable, Bone, Wood, Lead and Silicone.

We could tell which fonts originated where because of their characteristics. The sable and bone fonts have a quick handwriting look to them. The silicone originated fonts are the sort that are likely to be created on a computer, such as a font with looks of detail or pixel fonts. Bone originated fonts have the same handwriting style as sable, but because of the nibs used have a flat terminals. Wood fonts were  geometric styled and produced on a large scale because of the wood density and grain which would interfere with the print. Metal type allowed for a smaller point size because it did not have the same issues as wood type.

Then we organised it into diferent categories which were defined by the letterform characteristics which can be seen below.

Below is serifs and san serifs.

For next weeks lesson, we were asked to bring "abc,xyz" uppercase and lowercase in a font that was created in  Stone, Sable, Bone, Wood, Lead and Silicone. Below are the 4 I have chosen so far.

Silicone

The pixel style is a style that was only created when computers were first made. The style originates from the pixels on the screen used to make up a letter.

Lead

The typewriter is one of the main uses of lead type. I chose this compared to a letterpress styled font as I wanted it to be easy to tell which is which.

Sable

The handwritten style and curved ends suggest that this font originated with sable.

Bone

The flat ends of the letterform suggests that this font was original hand rendered with a fountain pen of some sort.

We were briefed with Task 4 today called Message Delivery, in which we have to create a body of research in response to a current story in a news paper of our choice on the 22nd of October.

We began doing research into the diferent types of newspaper that there are. We split into groups and determined that the main types of newspapers are:

• Broadsheets
• Tabloids
• Regionals
• Middle market tabloids
• Specific Papers
• Freesheets
• Online news sources.

In our groups we came up with as many of each as possible. Below are the results:

Broadsheets:

• The Evening Standard
• New York Times
• Daily Mail
• Independent
• Times
• Washington Post
• Guardian
• Financial Times
• Daily Telegraph
• I Newspaper

Tabloids:

• The Mirror
• Daily Star
• The Sun
• Daily Express
• The People
• Daily Record

Regionals:

• London Evening Standard
• Telegraph
• Yorkshire Evening Post
• Washington Post
• New York Times

News Reporting Websites:

• Sky News
• ABC
• Vice
• The Guardian
• BBC News
• MSN
• Yahoo
• Google News
• Metro UK
• Reddit
• ITV News
• NBC
• FOX
• Bing
• Onion

TV News:

• BBC News
• Sky News
• This Morning 
• The One Show

Apps:

• Flipboard
• BBC News
• Sky News
• Pulse
• Newsify
• The Guardian

At the final crit yesterday I presented my 10 letters. Everyone responded positively to all of them. Now i need to decide which design to take forward to create a whole typeface with. Simon suggested using the design which I believed represented the word "method" best. As I'm quite indecisive, I asked others for feedback as to which they thought represented the word "method" best.

Feedback showed that the 3 designs below communicate the word "method" best. I plan to see which look best digitised and decide then.

In the Illustrator induction we looked into the diferent file setups that we can have and which formats can be used for diferent purposes. There are presets to change the size of the art board such as A4, A3, A5 etc, but you can also enter the size manually. As well as this, you can add a bleed to the page if needed. Below are a few screenshots.

We briefly looked at the pen tool and how it can be used to create smooth curved lines and the physics to the pull of the 3rd anchor that you place.

We quickly used the pen tool in a test document to see if we could trace some simple objects. Below are the results.

We were then allowed to explore the diferent tools at our disposal in illustrator. I created the pattern-like design below using the rotation tool with the shortcut Cmd + D which repeats the last thing that you did which in this case, was moving an object whilst copying it with the alt key.

Below is a design a found on the internet which is an illustrator users guide to shortcuts. 

Today I chose which designs I wanted to use as my final 10 letterforms. Here they are with a short explanation of the concepts behind them.

I have made the bowl of the C smaller and the stroke of the C larger in the middle to represent the design process visually. 

One of the reoccurring definitions of "method" was "The procedure of taking as set of steps to accomplish something". This is the easiest was to create the Century C with minimal lines or "steps".

This t runs along the same concept as the previous letterform, although I have not sacrificed curves. I trimmed serifs off of all the letters to create a more simplistic letterform.

This is probably the most obvious and probably the strongest concept I came up with. The letterform shows the diferent stages that have been taken to create this letterform.

The concept behind this letterform originated when I first researched the word "method". The famous Shakespeare quote "There's method in the madness" came up. The idea behind this letterform is that up close all the squiggles look like "madness" but in fact when you look at the picture you can see quite a crisp letterform.

This shares the same concept as the previous letterform but uses  dot-work instead

This shares the same "Design Process" concept as the first C, but has been taken further by making the start and end of the letter come to a point. Like the design process, you start out with nothing, gain experience and knowledge (thick stroke) and then refine your knowledge and concepts to come to a point with a final design.

This design follows the same concept as the previous although It has thin serif ends and been made into and outline to resemble the design process diagram below.

The concept behind this design is showing the methods used in creating typefaces, showing the measurements of lines, strokes and angles.

This design shows the method used to write the letterform with handwriting whilst still retaining century characteristics.

Tomorrow I will choose one on these designs to take forward and create a whole alphabet with.