Graphics Elective - First Week - Typography

-TYPOGRAPHY-

So this is the elective I was waiting for the whole time. I was definitely nervous going into it because I had seen the work that had gone before me the four weeks previous and I was seriously impressed with the standard that was shown. I was also hoping not to get a word that was too obscure or too unapproachable so I was a little bit relieved when I pulled the word 'BETWEEN' out of the box. I thought that it was definitely workable and I was off thinking straight away. Down to the scribble pad I went and hammered out some concepts for the word. As this week was purely typographical we had to find a way of representing our word using only text, but using it in any means possible.

At first everything was very safe and not really pushing the idea anywhere but I kept at it and made some pieces in Illustrator that I thought were ok but I knew myself that I could do better. My concerns were confirmed when I should the first few bits to my tutor Patricia, she echoed my thoughts on it all being very safe and far too 2 dimensional. I think it was around lunch time that this happened and I remember going through my bag and finding some electrical tape, wires from my sculpture project, my camera and grabbing my scalpel and a good bit of A3 card and suddenly had a flood of ideas to work from. It was a pretty constructive lunch.

First thing's first, a mind-map.

Very rough ideas about how to approach playing with the style of the word.

Everything between I could think of at the time.

A little more exploration.

My intention here was to sew the letters into my fingers just under the very top layer of skin,
something I remember doing in class a few times when I was a lot younger, oddly enough. It turns out this was a bit too illustrative for that week, and it ended up being too typographic for the illustration week. Go figure.

Onto the first few treatments I did for the word 'Between'. These are all pretty easy and safe and I'm glad I didn't go that route for the final piece but it was good to get them out of the way so that I knew what not to do.

I was hoping to use two pieces of perspex here to frame the words.

Quick sketch for the short movie.

This is where the scalpel, card, and fishing wire come in.

This pathway was outside the window where my desk was and by chance I counted the
rows of trees and realised it was the same as my word, lucky break.

I think this piece is the most effective in a typographical sense. Using the negative space between the off cuts of the letters from the piece in the trees outside it shows the meaning of the word pretty well. I was happy with how it turned out. The white card is a strong contrast to the environment around it and stands out well.

Couldn't resist taking a video of the view between the trees, the letters look 

like they are just floating in mid-air.

Between between and between.