P3 Exercises

Exercise 1: Typeface Tracing

The first exercise consisted of taking a group of different type fonts and tracing over with a fine-tip sharpie to really study the differences and characteristics for each type of font. Below is the snapshot of my final work for the exercise.

From the hand-tracing exercise I was able to differentiate the fonts and characterize of fonts.

In doing this exercise, I could see how the type faces changed from more complex with the small tail on each letter, to the more simple and modern-looking styles that are the Helvetica and Futura fonts. It feels that the more modern the types became, the more simple and straightforward evolved.

Exercise 2: Typographic Voice

Above my iterations for the different typefaces that I experimented with using the words of “serendipity” and “Tradition”

For the words that I chose to study, I decided to focus on the feelings that the words themselves convey first, and then looked through and chose from the list of fonts that I felt best represented those feelings.

Serendipity by definition is the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. Because of this, I associate serendipitous events with a positive connotation and so more free-spirited and lighthearted. To me, that means that the font would look more hand-written and flowy as well as more free flowing. I thought that the fonts of Paete Round, Segoe Script, and Vivaldi Italic from the list respectively best represented those feelings. These fonts all convey a more freeing experience, although not all are of the same family of fonts. Out of the three, I felt that the Segoe Script font worked the best to convey the meaning of serendipity.

As for the word tradition, tradition by definition is the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation, or the fact of being passed on in this way. With this, I associate tradition with something taken from the past, and so I immediately thought of the type faces used in the past which looked more ornamental and complicated. The fonts that I used for my three iterations used more detailing and fancy styles which call from the fonts used in the past. In following the methods of the past fonts, tradition is implied and utilized. For my iterations, I used the fonts GothicE, Colonna MT, and Algerian on the list respectively. Out of the three, I felt that the font of the GothicE represented the word tradition best.