Drop Cap Alphabet - Process Book

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process book



inspiration The idea for this project arose from my obsession with Jessica Hische’s work, particularly her daily drop cap project. In her project, she created twelve alphabets, with each letter designed in a different style and color. Before sketching my ideas for each letter, I went through Jessica Hische’s alphabets, choosing my favorites out of all her designs. In addition, I found inspiration in the style of ancient books and manucripts and in various patterns, such as the tribal print shown on the opposite page.


sketches With my pencil and sketchbook in hand and my Pinterest board open, I sketched each letter out. For some letters, I sketched multiple ideas and later chose the best one. For others, the ideas were set from the very beginning. There was only one letter that was not sketched out beforehand, which was the W.




vectors I scanned these completed sketches into the computer and vectorized each letter with the pen tool. This required me to make the strokes into shapes, rather than lines, and to make sure that no lines were out of place so as not to cut letters in half when lasercutting. In addition, I chose the colors in this stage so that I would be able to discern which pieces of which letters would be cut out of each color of paper.


laser cut After creating vectors in Illustrator, I brought each one into AutoCAD, the program read by the laser cutter. I marked the outline of each sheet of paper and separated each letter into pieces based the color of paper from which they would be cut. This step of the process was more challenging because the laser cutter had to cut all the way through the paper without burning it.




glue Finding glue was more challenging than I had expected. The Tacky Gel was effective for gluing the pieces of cardstock together. However, when I glued the first letter to its page, the entire page curled up becuase of the water base of the gel glue. In addition, some of the glue sticks that I tested did not successfully bind the letters to the pages. I ultimately chose to use the glue stick below to bind the letters to the pages.


bind book This book binding technique utilized signatures. I first nailed holes into each signature which aligned with each other and with the holes cut in the outer matte board binding. I then sewed each signature into the outer binding.




cover I originally created the left design for the book cover. However, when I cut this design and put it on the book, I realized it was not what I wanted. The design itself, in addition to the black space, created a harsh feeling that did not match the elegant feel of the letters in the book. After trying several other designs, I decided to use a plain white cover with the black lining inside because it fit the elegant feel of the letters


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