History – Found Type
For this assignment we we asked to first search for letters found in the world around us. We had to see these letters in everyday things. They could not be already created, we had to discover them. After we photographed eighteen examples, we were to take those ideas and create fonts. After we had ideas we were to design three and come up with a new name for our new font.
My photographs were mainly of the historic section of a city about an hour away. I had been these places many times, and apparently only looked, it was amazing to see all these new discoveries. I had lots of ideas at first – cupcakes, gumballs, and polka dots, but a main challenge was that I had to find or manipulate the letter or object. All of my ideas were now void. I had a fun concept of using tools. Since a tool is defined as an object put in ones had to get the job done, I photographed some of my favorites – hammer, pencil, massager, pan lid, toilet tissue. Once again maybe not the best concept.
I chose to go with my outdoorsy photographs, and contemplated forever on the perfect word. I came up with oodles of words, and discovered the perfect word, JOY, I was going to find JOY. My life has been kind of hard, and I could definitely use moe JOY. I went looking for it, found it and began, only to remember one of the requirements was that the word must be 6-10 letters long. I studied my photographs, and my notes and discovered a new word, that matched my photographs. I went back and took more photos and did nine variations. I wanted the letters to be easily recognizable, simple and historic. This project intrigued me because certain letters I thought would work didn’t and vice versa. Challenged I found many letters, realizing some are easier to find than others, and some are down right hard to find. I began to see my style immerse and become more evident. I also wanted to create something I would hang in my home. I designed this project in InDesign and did the photocolor changes in Photoshop. This will definitely go down in HISTORY as one of my favorite projects ever. I cannot wait to make more, especially when I find JOY!
