p'A'per clip

Very impressed by Oded Ezer's work in general and this work with 3D typography in particular, I decided to experiment with 3D typography myself. It was quite simple really.... I took 2 paperclips and folded them into the letter 'A' in plan view. It was the elevations that were interesting......

 

Split Personalities

Being intrigued by the person that was Eric Gill, I decided to take a closer look at all the fonts that were designed by him. I thought his serif fonts were quite fantastic. From the quietly confident Perpetua, to the attention seeker - the Floriated Caps; I think Gill instilled strong personalities in his letter forms. 

Perpetua | Joanna | Gill Floriated Capitals

I thought it would be an amusing study to mix these 'personalities' and see what resulted from them. I decided to dissect the letters in half and then mix and match them to each other. What was really interesting to note, and what I learnt from this experiment, is that some important element of the letters always matched up to each other. It could be that the top of the cross bar aligned, or the peak coincided. These subtleties would not have been apparent by just looking at the letterforms in isolation.

Floriated Caps vs Jubilee

Perpetua vs Joanna

Joanna vs Floriated Caps

Jubilee vs Perpetua

Superhero Gill S

I had a lot of fun with this one. I made little placards of letters on trace paper so that I could overlay the different kinds and decide for myself which was the most interesting overlay. Came up with some really fun stuff which led to creation of completely new letters which I hope to use someday when I write my superhero Gill comic strip :-)

Analyze that : Getting somewhere

The various analysis diagrams got me addicted! I decided to keep going with the family of Gill Sans a bit more since there were both similarities and differences to map out. And the more I analyzed, the more I knew I was getting somewhere. Had no idea where yet, but was sure it was somewhere!

This exercise finally led me to a much better understanding of how a font family worked. What were those intrinsic qualities that made a letterform a part of a 'family' and what elements could be changed in it to make it either 'bold' or 'italic' without losing its essence.

Now I was analyzing with a wee bit more understanding.....

Analysis Diagrams

This was basically an exercise in analytically studying the peak of an A. I took a few 'A's of varying shapes and sizes, cut them up along the base of their cross bar and studied the resultant top half. The images with the dots are not random! They are very careful and meticulous analysis of some point of the letterform with the chosen 'A's as my reference. The typefaces used were (L to R across rows from top LH corner) : Century Gothic, Optima, Helvetica, Impact, Bauhaus 93, Baskerville, Lucida Calligraphy Italic, Monotype Corsiva, Harrington, Eccentric Std, American Typewriter, Lucida Blackletter and Scriptina.

Choosing various 'A's. 

Chopping the letter to define the area between the peak and the base of the cross bar

Various analysis diagrams resulting from comparing different parameters of the letterform

(These were quite inspired after reading Tufte's Beautiful Evidence, especially 'Dotdashplot' and '3DScatterplot'

The Peak of an 'A':Part SP (for 'Starting Point')

 
For one of the tasks, we were meant to analyze parts of a letter. We could choose any part of any letter for our study. I chose the letter 'A' because 1) I spent waaaay too long staring at it that I never got to even the second letter, ie 'a' of the Aa Bb Cc patterned type sheet in front of me and 2) I was quite mesmerized with the various different different ways that two lines joined to form the 'peak' of the letter 'A'. So it was time to break it down. Literally.

I took the part of the 'A' between the cross bar and the peak and did a series of analysis diagrams on a bunch of different 'A's.

Tracing only the horizontal lines

Defining the area that I thought formed the peak

Outlining the shape of the triangle that formed the top part of the 'A'

so on and so forth.... 

(Quite a comprehensive online resource on parts of a letter can be found here)