OUGD403 : Design Skills - Alphabet Soup : Illustrator Alphabet

As part of the Alphabet Soup Brief, we were asked to choose one of our 10 letterforms from the 'visual thinking' brief and produce and alphabet based in it on Illustrator. 

The emphasis of the brief was on investigation and experimentation of Adobe Illustrator through timetabled workshops / tasks and the production of our alphabet in our own time. When producing our final outcomes we were asked to consider the essence of our subject matter and how is best to communicate it. 

Although I had previously used the pen tool in Illustrator, I felt the through the tasks set within the Illustrator workshop I had develop my skills to use the tool more effectively and felt more confident using it. I therefore chose to use this tool to create the characters in my Alphabet.

As the aim of my Alphabet was to visually communicate the word 'Melt' when tracing over my letterform in Illustrator I, instead of tracing directly over the corners used the pen tool to create a curve to give the impression of the letterform slowly melting. 

As the design of my character was in three 'parts' I used the layer option in Illustrator to separate the letterform, bottom, middle and top onto separate layers which is one of the techniques I learned from the Illustrator workshops as it effectively organises the file and was therefore easier to create my characters.

To Organise my letterforms for A1 poster which is a deliverable of the brief I used the guides on Illustrator to create an 6 by 8 grid which I then placed my final letterforms onto. 

Once I had created my alphabet based on my chosen letterform, I also created a series of glyphs as I was interested in whether the design would work for glyphs as well as characters.

 - Final A1 Poster

Once I had finished my final alphabet, I used the characters to create the word 'Melt' as I wanted to test the legibility and whether the design could work as a functioning font. Although, I believe the word is legible in my font I feel that using lower case may have been more effective than uppercase to convey the 'softening' or 'melting' of the letterform.