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.....

Hand Rendering

I never quite put so much thought into writing my name!

The real task was to trace our names from a set of different typefaces that were provided so that we could 'feel' the letterforms. Also realize the importance of placement and spacing between the letters. I, as usual, ended up concentrating more on the tertiary task which was, to write out our names in such a way that it conveyed something about ourselves.
I love tracing! So the real task that was given, might as well have been a nice, gooey, warm, chocolate brownie! At the moment, I cannot quite remember which typefaces I used (annotation alert!), but I think they were Caslon for 'Roopa' and definitely Gill Sans for 'basu'. I used a classic serif and a classic san serif to convey my contradictions : strong but delicate, traditional but modern, or even dreamer AND a believer!
I centered my surname because I wanted to convey a 'strong base' that would visually 'hold me up'. I remember being torn about using a bigger font size for 'basu' to give 'Roopa' a bit more support. But then I remember discarding that idea because I wanted 'Roopa' to stand out much more than 'basu'. Overall, I remember wanting for it to have a balanced feel even though the typefaces used were different from each other.