OUGD403 - Alphabet Soup : Illustrator

Alphabet Soup : Illustrator

For the second of our four workshops into the introduction of Illustrator we focused on experimenting with tools such as; the blend tool and the width tool. Learning these skills and how to use Illustrator effectively, will prove useful when producing the final outcomes for this brief.

We started our second Illustrator workshop by modifying the 'g' letterform we created in last weeks workshop. The Width Tool, which we used, adds width to a anchor point and which enabled us to give depth to the 'flat' letterform. I feel this technique could prove useful when creating my own alphabet as it is an easy way to create a 'shadow' for an letterform, which wanted for one of my orginal ten designs.

As well hand-rendered letterforms produced using the pen tool, this technique could also be used on existing typefaces such as Helvetica to create an modified letterform.

 As well as the Width Tool, we also used the Blend Tool in this session. Using the Blend Tool, we were able to blend together different shapes and colours. I particularly like the effect given by the 'specified steps' option as it showed the transition in the blending process. Again, I feel this technique will be useful when I produce my own designs in Illustrator as a couple of my designs are based on the idea of 'blending'.

 

I experimented with using the Blend tool on two letterforms, however Idon't belive this idea would work as an alphabet as it is not legible.