Alphabet Soup - Illustrator Workshop

As part of our illustrator workshop, we was asked to base our brief around this. Our task was to create a typeface in illustrator that is based on a letter from the previous Alphabet soup brief.

I started by looking back at the letterforms i had previously created in the Alphabet Soup brief. I looked out for a few things before selecting a final letter to base a full alphabet on.

• The letter must be legible enough (even when put together in an alphabet)
• Easy to recreate for each letter of the alphabet with glyphs
• relate to the original brief, based on the word 'STRETCH'
• 
  

I felt like these selection of 'T's' that i had previously created would work the best a full computer generated typeface. 

I then looked back at the brief to see which letter out of these would work the best...

"Produce an alphabet based on one of the letterforms you created from the Alphabet Soup, Visual Thinking brief. You are restricted to using black and one colour and it is to be produced in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, key). Although you are restricted to one colour you experiment with opacity and half tones.

You should use your research and experience to date as well as your studio based visual investigations as a starting point. You will use Abobe Illustrator as a tool for visual investigation."

Looking at the brief, i am restricted to black and one colour. Each letter would work well under these colours. I can experiment with half tones and opacity so i will have to think about this when seeing taking the chosen letterform into illustrator.

I chose this letterform for a few different reasons...

• After the final crit, this letter was chosen out of everybody in the class as one of the best. None of my other letters made it onto the board.
• I can see it working as a full typeface that would almost look 3d, slanting off to the right.
• its simple. Made up of clean lines, i can't see this taking too long to make. i could use certain aspects of some letters to re-create other letters.
• It works well as just one colour. stands out as black on white but also has some room for experimentation with another colour.