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Contents
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Introduction I’ve accrued a great deal of knowledge over the course of my internship here at Murphy Empire, and I’d like to take a moment to reflect on how this work is endemic of that learning experience.
Amalgamation Color, vintage illustration, and other elements come together in these pieces to create patterns and graphics that aren’t confined by any stretch of the imagination.
Alternate Covers Covers that didn’t quite make the cut, but were noteworthy of sharing as a body of work on their own merit. Each one is endemic of the overall content of the magazine and the different elements that help to comprise it.
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Hand Wrought From logo type to an entire font family, this body of work utilizes vector tracing to bring hand designed typography from the sketchbook and onto the computer.
Intermedia Photopgraphy and typography comingle in this series to show the represent the graphic power that typography has as a 2D element in 3D space.
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Introduction
When I first arrived at Murphy Empire, I didn’t quite anticipate just how broadened my design repertoire would become in the short time frame of four months. Within the first few months of my experience, I found myself already equipped with a skill set that I hadn’t yet even touched upon in my experience thus far as Maine College of Art. Not to discredit my education, but to have been able to fall under the careful guidance of such skilled designers has been one of the most enriching and fortunate opportunities of my life. To say that I’ll be walking away from this experience ahead of the game is an understatement. In this short time we’ve spent together, Ken Murphy has taken the time to sit down with me and take me step-by-step through tools and applications that were unknown to me up to this point and how to apply them to various areas of design including logo type and designing font families. Rather than my taskmaster, he has acted as my mentor and teacher, becoming genuinely invested in my learning experience within his small High Street studio. In place of making copies and going on coffee runs, I’ve had carefully crafted lessons and the freedom to create the kind of work I love to make. What I got was much, much greater than that, and I really just couldn’t ask for more.
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This workbook is a physical testament to that accrued knowledge. Within these pages are the accumulation of the work that has come to be thanks to the lessons that I’ve learned here at Murphy Empire. Each section in this magazine is representative of a different idea, direction, or exploration that I took with this project. Not only was this work an collection of pieces that utilized what I’ve learned, but it’s work that I truly loved doing. I’ve always told myself I won’t do work that I myself aren’t head-over-heels for, and this was never more true than here. Other than subtle nudges in the right direction, I was able to approach each of these with my own vision from start to finish. I hope that you will enjoy looking through this work as much as I enjoyed making it.
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I do as a designer always starts out on paper. Whether it’s sketching ideas or creating an image that will later be transferred to the computer, the most natural way for me to work is with a pencil in my hand. So it was to my delight to have received more extensive training with Adobe Illustrator and vector tracing. With Ken Murphy’s guidance, I’ve become more familiar with Illustrator and its capabilities, taking my work to a more high quality level that allowed for more versatility and a wider range of applications. Not to mention, I’d been doing it the hard way! Thank goodness for Adobe Illustrator, it’s a designer’s godsend. he majority of the work
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You could say that this was the first official exercise that I had tackled with Ken Murphy, and it all began with him looking over my shoulder and noticing a doodle I had done in my notebook. In my free time in between my little assignments, I had sketched up the word ‘Root’ in a thick, curvy script type. (Root being inspired by a meeting with a client the day before.) Ken only needed to see it once before deciding that this was the perfect place to begin my learning experience, having had been very enamored with the hand-drawn, elegant nature of the word I had illustrated. I had yet to approach Illustrator as a medium I was fairly comfortable with using on
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a regular basis. Together we began first with selecting about four nautical themed words to work with in the style I had drawn up Root. My choices were Grog, Regatta, Belay, and Avast. What made this an interesting first project was the nature of the words. Adobe Illustrator and it’s ability to vector trace uses a system of points, meaning that achieving smooth curves is possible. The greatest challenge was that a majority of these words were comprised mainly of curves, meaning everything had to be carefully adjusted in order to maintain the integrity of the original drawings I had created by hand on paper in my sketchbook.
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Ken took the reigns with this first word to give me an idea of how to work with the anchor points and paths of the shape.
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The trickiest part of learning this new skill was determining where to place points on the curves to achieve the most natural shapes possible. I was wandering around blindly in this respect for a week or two, making rough guesses of where to most extreme curves on the letterforms were. As Ken explained to me, this is something that takes years of practice, and I certainly wasn’t discouraged by the mistakes that I made in the process.
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WHEN YOU INTERN FOR MURPHY EMPIRE you have to dabble in a little bit of logo type and identity design. Equipped with my knowledge of Adobe Illustrator from my previous exercise, it was time to take it a step further and start thinking about what it’s like to design logo type and how to take letters and transform them into iconic forms rather than legible type. In most logos, the words become part of the form, and this is how you remember them in your head.
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Moving in the opposite direction from where we were with the nautical script type, the goal of this exercise was not to focus on curves in Illustrator, but geometric and straight lines. However, like with the script type, the letters themselves had to transcend from just seeing letters to the letters themselves becoming the 2D form. Again, I muddled over my favorite words. I wanted to think of a word that really meant something to me and was interested in. I almost chose the word entropy, meaning the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity. In other words, give and take in the broadest sense.
Instead, I chose the word ‘entelechy’, meaning the actualization of form amd the condition of something whose essence is fully realized. I’ve always felt to be very self-aware of who I am as well as my goals, which is why I enjoy this word. With this word, however, I wanted to break down the geometric shape of each letter and seperate the layers. I took the horizonal, vertical, and diagonal lines in each letter and separated them. Simple, but when all the lines were separated from one another and you look at them as shapes, you really begin to realize how all type is just a series of lines and shapes organized into visual language.
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Artwork credit to Lucian Stanculescu
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Once I had nailed down the logo type, the
completeness, but when their circular ‘halo’
next step was to give it the feel of an actual
is broken, they become horns and thus be-
logo and I knew I wanted a shape involved.
coming a fallen angel. I couldn’t help but be
I had actually initially come across the word
interested by this. So of course, the shape
entelechy in Lucian Stanculescu’s artwork
incorperated into the logo type had to be that
Entelechia. Completeness, and was quite
of a circle, inspired by this halo and giving
inspired by not only the beauty of the piece,
the logo a clean, simple look overall that ex-
but the word itself. Speculation on this piece
pressed the truest meaning of the word ‘com-
says that this could be an angel, a being of
pleteness’ and tied it all together.
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MY FINAL LESSON with Adobe Illustrator was one I didn’t think we would be getting to, but one that I was thrilled to be executing. When I was told I would be creating my own font family in my handwriting, it was like the graphic designer inside of my head was bouncing around like “I can finally call myself a real designer! I’ve designed a typeface!” While it would take as little as a year to prepare an actual font family for publishing, something I obviously didn’t have the time or software for, I was just happy to have this in my files for my own personal use. The funny thing about my handwriting is that I’ll throw in cursive letters in alongside the print , for no real reason in particular other than it comes naturally when I’m writing. So when approaching this project, I knew I had to throw in a couple of the cursive letters I tend to write most often, as this wouldn’t be truly indicative of my chicken scratch without a few of those thrown in.
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Unlike designers like Mark Jamra who have dedicated their lives to perfecting the art of meticulously crafting typefaces and spend years of their lives making sure their typography is flawless down to the last pica, I unfortunately lack all the time and resources (and experience, but this comes with time...) to be as thorough as all my seniors. I stuck with the basics for things like commas and apostrophes, glyphs used in everyday type. Ken had me illustrate the numbers in three different styles; one in a more oldstyle, classy way, one in a simple and neat fashion, and the third in my own quickly jotted chicken scratch. This sort of variety can be found in some of the most well-designed and unique typefaces, and he wanted to emphasize the importance of including different styles of numbering and lettering. The human eye is very capable of picking up on even the most subtle of changes, and when reading a typeface these small changes can pretty easily be recognized. As Ken explained, this shows a designer’s true proclivity and attention to detail when designing a typeface for yourself.
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Ken suggested adding these little ornaments, which were fun to concieve and draw.
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I
f there is anything
I’ve
noticed in
my
work as it’s developed over the years, it’s that I love bringing multiple elements together. I’m never
content with just typography, I always need something more. Before I came into the Graphic Design major at MECA, I was persuing Illustration as my intended degree. While I learned during my first two years that I was more graphically inclined, illustration and imagery is a strong part of the work that I do as a designer and I try to incorperate it into as much of my work as I possibly can.
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Like with my other projects this summer, this one had a very fixed starting point. I had bought this little Pictorial Webster’s Dictionary on sale for $6 at Longfellow Books back in June. I’m a sucker for vintage illustrations and linotype prints, so this was a treat. Not to mention the lovely endpaper on the backs of the front and back covers. What really got me was how these illustrations reminded me of Murphy Empire’s body of work, so naturally I had to show Ken. He was just as in love as I was.
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Learning how to bitmap images in Adobe Illustrator, thankfully, wouldn’t be akin to learning a new language. There are simply a number of steps you have to slog through to achieve the right outcome. However, I can be bad at remembering the correct steps for things. I’ve stumbled a few times, forgetting what to do when I import bitmaps into Illustrator and all that jazz, but really pratice ultimately makes perfect. For the longest time, whenever I wanted to create a transparent image, I would take something into Photoshop and take out all the negative space in an image with the eraser tool, piece by piece, until I achieved the end result. As I’ve learned, but have very stubbornly tried to ignore, this diminished the quality of the image to a significant degree.
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Staying true to the nautical theme I already had running in previous projects so far this summer, the images I chose from my little pictorial dictionary was that of sea life that I thought would work well with the ideas I had in mind. Not only that, but these seacreatures are also ones that can be found in Maine, tying in with mine and Ken’s love of the ocean here in the marina city of Portland.
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More use of red and blue...Can’t escape those primaries!
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As a fan of cute patterns, I had to get these out of my system, and they tied in well with the lesson Ken gave me relating to bitmapsand creating vectors that remain at a highresolution despite how you stretch andmanipulate it. This had always been my biggest issue when working with PNG filesin Photoshop before I became aware of using Illustrator for transparent images. I can’t achieve the same level of quality in Photoshop, and in reality, using PNG fileswould result in more hours of work that resulted in lower quality products. Needless to say, this lesson may have been one of the most important skill I will have taken away from this internship. Patterns weren’t the only avenue I took when playing with these beautiful vintage illustrations. The image off to the right there is a little exercise I dabbled with when trying to decide where to go next with the graphic elements I had on hand.Illustration, color, and photography are the most abundant elements in the work I like to do as a designer, and I enjoy the interplay that can be created between them. The way the roundness of the horseshoe crab reflects the circle and the contrasting weights of the Vanity typeface reflecting the varying weights of the illustration all relate back to one another.
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Colorful sealife weren’t the only creatures to find their way from the pages of my littlebook and into my design work. A common motif around the Murphy Empire studio are stags and antlers, from the mounted deer’s head above where I worked to the antlers hanging on the wall outside. So it only felt fitting that I include this behorned steed in some of the illustration-based work I was experimenting with. And I would be lying through my teeth if I didn’t say that the stag, among other elements, werem’t inspired by the NBC show, Hannibal.
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If I wanted to be inspired by the work done in Murphy Empire’s studio, I had to think with a little more posh and sophistication. And a little prep. When I think of preppy, I think back to a book I once saw sitting on the checkout counter of a Brooks Brothers down in Nashville, Tennessee. The book is titled True Prep: It’s A Whole New Old World. The book cover itself was designed by the relentlessly talented Chip Kidd, which only heightened my appreciation for the lovely color choice and composition of the cover. This acted as my inspiration.
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Another aspect I felt compelled to include in this preppy little series was a touch of nature. Staying in the vein of black and white, vintage illustrations, I wanted to bring some old illustrations of flowers into my work. Having just learned about bitmaps in Illustrator, I thought about this as a possible route, but instead found a wonderful series of old, illustrated flower brushes for Photoshop, which allowed me to play with and adjust the placement of the flowers however I wished, which was just utterly delightful and very fun. I’m continuously drawn back to the primary colors, or at least variations on them. The reds, blues, and yellows found consistently throughout my work are elements that I find myself drawn to again and again. Not that I have any qualms with the rest of ROYGBV, but there’s something about those three main colors that I can’t seem to keep myself away from...
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’ve tackled vector tracing. I grappled with bitmaps. I’ve had my romp with all that, but photo manipulation is one my fortes and passions, so it was time I got back to one of the mediums I love most; photography. Now, I’m no professsional photographer, but I’m enamored with photos themselves and how I can incorperate them into the work that I do. Photos capture a moment and allow it to exist for all of time. If I see something I want to work with in 3D space, I don’t need sculpture or something of the like; I only need a photo. Shapes and elements in our world reflect typography in many ways, and they intermingle beautifully when allowed.
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Work credit to Andrew Pfund.
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For anyone who knows me fairly well, they will know that I am an avid Pinner on the website Pinterest. I’m always pulling in different recipes and ideas for design to recall back to later. But one of the main reasons I love Pinterest is for its Design section of the website and all the inspiration there is to be drawn from it. It’s rare that you come across the same piece of work twice, and there’s always an artist whose work you’ve never seen before and want to look into further. Being introduced to so many different graphic designers and artists through coming across their work has been a tremendous source of inspiration for me and also has pushed me to want to improve even more. One such
body of work that I came across was that of one Andrew Pfund, a graphic designer from Los Angeles who created a series of film festival posters in which he juxtaposed nature and industrialism to show how industry doesn’t belong in nature. I was so taken by the simple way he used type and gave it the looming, grand presence that it had in this poster. The dark color and bold sans serif dwarf the small man in the foreground. I am consistently captured by intermingling typography and photography, allowing type to act as a 2D graphic in a 3D space. I enjoy giving type a presence that coincides with the environment around it and emulates what exists in its surroundings.
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This was a project I had nearly complete control over. Ken emphasized that I was free to play and try the ideas I had really been wanting to try out. That being said, he also wished for me to incorperate the logo type I had designed in the last assignment.
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I’m someone who’s always taking pictures. I’m a huge nature fanatic who will share her photos of flowers and sandy beaches on Instagram even if I’ve posted a thousand like them before. For me, even during the harder periods of time in my life, I’ve always
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found comfort in the natural, unchanging beauty of Maine and it’s big, open skies and vast oceans. So it only made sense that I use one of the dozens of photos that I love taking in my spare time. The Portland skyline worked well for what I wanted to
achieve with my Entelechy logo. The way I was able to have the logo sit behind the long city skyline in the wide open sky felt natural. The logo itself with its simple, thin and geometric characteristics allowed it to blend right in with the environment quietly.
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and one of them happens to be black and white photographs of the lovely Audrey Hepburn. I truly believe there never has been, and never will be, a woman more beautiful than her. For me, she is the very quintessential model of elegance and sophistication. Like with how I knew I had to include my photography in my work, I had a strong desire to incorperate Audrey into my typography interplay. I am a fan of the black and white photography of her especially for its simplicity and boldness, and how it can allow for any number of possibilities whether that means including color or a bold serif font. Granted, there are far more possibilities than just that, but for the amount of time I had, I knew I wanted to keep it as simple as possible. Like how I incorperated the Entelechy logo into my landscape photography, I wanted to keep in the vein of bringing together type and photography and from there allowing the natural shapes of the photographic elements to marry with the type I was to include. This wasn’t a terribly difficult choice for me to make in terms of what letter(s) to use. ‘A’ would suffice. I dabbled with the idea of more than one letter (An ‘H’, perhaps?) but ultimately omitted that idea. To keep in the vertical alignment of the A, I searched for a photo of Audrey perhaps standing, or one of her many eclectic, playful poses in her black sweater and pants. But I found in the end that I was happy with a simple, bust for this particular set of work.
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I don’t think this is Audrey, but it has the same vibe that I was going for...
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Summer 2014 Look familiar? It should! Working with these black and white photos of Audrey seeped into the work I did for the cover of this magazine, and ultimately I knew that using this idea for the cover would be a good embodiment of everything that I had put into this magazine as a show of what I’ve learned at Murphy Empire. A little bit of everything was thrown into the cover, but Audrey is the real star here. As I’ve stated before, I’m certainly no professional photographer, but I’ve found that photography plays one of the greatest roles in the work that I do as a designer. I enjoy the interplay that occurs between the objects in a photo and the graphic elements such as photography or illustration that I can bring into it. In that way, you could almost say the work that I do is multimedia on some sort of level.
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his is a collection of the covers
I curned out when trying to conceptualize just what I wanted the cover to look like. They didn’t quite make the cut, but they are still pieces that encapsulated the main idea behind this whole magazine and the work inside of it, and I feel they are worth sharing here. Some of them play with different titles, while others experiment with different ideas all together, but each one is endemic of the central theme I wanted to achieve.
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