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CONCEPT PROBLEM SOLVING DEVELOPMENT TROUBLESHOOTING MAJUSCULE MINUSCLE ALTERNATES NUMERALS, PUNCTUATION & SYMBOLS APPLICATION
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Maxie B’s is a local bakery and dessert café located in my hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. This bakery is a favorite of the locals of Greensboro and has been around for some thirty-one years. Even with a recent update to their website, their logo has remained the same calligraphy it has been for many years now. The bakery is not just about sweet goodies, the atmosphere at Maxie B’s was created with gathering in mind. They are well furnished with a rustic chic style creating a relaxing and enjoyable space for friends to come and enjoy a sweet treat. This being why I named my typeface Koinonia, the Greek word for community. I wanted to create a typeface that encompassed the sophisicated and vintage ambience that Maxie B’s exudes as well as the inviting quality about their shop. Their original, calligraphy logo has a handmade feel about it. For the typeface to be effective, it needed to uphold the same eclectic feel as the interior of the shop, as well as seemlessly blend with the modern updates of the website. Koinonia was designed primarily for the use of header texts within the bakery, whether that is the logo, website, stationary, and packaging.This is in hopes of creating a stronger brand idenity within the bakery.
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The old logo did not cohesively represent Maxie B’s bakery and dessert cafÊ effectivly or aesthetically. I wanted Koinonia to incorporate their style within it, creating a typeface that is easily ledgible and simple but still sophisticated. As usual, when I have a project, I have about five hundred and twenty seven different ideas that come to me. Therefore in the beginning stages, it is crucial for me to narrow down my ideas through researching. I find this helps me to consolidate my ideas and have a better concept of what I am designing for and the function and aesthics of my designs.
From the beginning, it was important that Koinonia invited the type of customer that Maxie B’s Bakery serves. After my research, I narrowed it down to what was crucial. The typeface I was designing needed to be simple, fresh, and timeless. However, this form lacked the homemade quality the previous logo had, and it was a little too simple.
Orginally, I thought I would be designing a Sans-Seirf typeface. With more researching and sketching, I came to the conclusion that a serif would fit the aesthetics of the bakery and its vintage modern charm. Therefore, I decided to abandon Sans-Serif and experiment with Serifs.
I felt the Slab-Serif embodied that same sophisticated handmade quality the original did. This resulted in choosing the Slab-Serif form because it was classic, yet simple, and timeless. I did not want Koinonia to be so trendy that it would not serve Maxie B’s for many years to come.
I found when sketching letterforms that it was helpful to go ahead and play with it in a large scale format. Originally I had planned on having a doble-story miniscule “a,” but as the letterforms developed more. I came to the single-story “a” was a better approach for keeping my typeface design a cohesive family.
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After deciding the direction of a Slab-Serif I wanted Koinonia to embody, I experimented more with a large scale format and the overall shape and the set width of my letterforms.
I started noticing an unique shape in Koinonia that appeared in many of my letterforms. You may see the shape here in the miniscule “a” form. This shape was created by chance due to the lack of large circular stencils I had at my disposal for the scale I was working in. After mastering this shape, I began implementing it wherever I could in all the letterforms.
I used the pen tool to create Koinonia from letterforms by tracing the scans of my final letter form renderings on vellum. One may notice towards the top of the A on the right, stroke weight is heavier than the left side of the form.
I was able to get some of the kinks out of my original digital renderings. You may notice in the minisule “a,” I made some changes within the interior curve point and moved it slightly higher than it was orginally planned to be in my sketches. This helped the strokes appear more unified and cohesive with the other strokes.
I designed the letterforms for A, B, H, O, P, and X first. Once I had these six letters in place, it allowed me to use the forms of these letters to create most of the other forms, giving Koinonia a strong unity and cohesion within the type family.
After creating the letterforms of A, B, H, P, O, and X, I used them as a reference for creating the other forms. However, once I digitized these forms and started contructing words with them, there were several that I had to go back and refine just because of the unique curve that I applied and used as often as I could in Koinonia’s designs. The J is just one example of how the curve was not effective for this form. I later refined it by removing the left side of the top bar and shortening the tail on the minuscule form. I also made similar changes to my original rendering for the minuscule: f, l, r, and t. The dot on the minuscule “j” also changed, once I created the period completely inspired by the negative space within the minuscule “o” form.
Any of the letterforms that involved diagonal strokes became incredibly challenging to keep the same width as the horizontal and vertical stokes of the forms. With much precision, I was able to finally make these diagonal slopes cohesive with the alternate strokes. Close attention was paid to all the letterforms that involved these kinks within them. With the majuscule and minuscule, K and R, I later revised where the bottom leg would start its desender, so it would not create such a sharp intersection.
The letterform P was a challenge after digitizing and filling the form in. I noticed the stroke weight and shape seemed off, as you can see here. Fortunately, after digitizing, I could easily piece together the form from other letters I had already created that were correct. Leaving the stroke widths cohesive throughout all of the letterforms. One thing I learned throughout this process is, it may look one way digital and completley different in print. Test printing is key.
Just like with the K and the P, I had problems with the majuscule W and its consistent stroke weight, primarily with the diagonal stokes. Originally, when I rendered the sketch for the W, it was the upside down version of the majuscule M, but during the digitizing, it did not come out as clean. To fix this, I just took the M again and flipped it since it did not have the stroke weight variations. The minisule “w” also brought about its own challenges with the base line and x-height. The “w” could not break the baseline, therefore I had the bottom slab-serif sit on the baseline and the one slab-serif at the top would just break the x-height like many of the minuscules ended up doing.
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Overall, I did not experience many troubles while designing Koinonia. There were a few letterforms that I had to refine as time went on. The significant challenge I was faced with was the relationship between the serifs and the curvature on many of my minuscules. Therefore, I ended up having to break the x-height for a number of them in order to not have an awkward triangle created because of the slab-serifs closeness to the curve. Fortunately, I was able to avoid that.
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BAKERY AND DESSERT CAFÉ
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Koinonia in use enhances the classic vintage vibe Maxie B’s already has. I opted to incorporate a pattern into my typeface for the use of the bakerys packaging in their new brand colors of blue and white. It was inspired by four diamound pattern that is currently on the bakerys facade. I played around with how to use the the diamond shape and came up the idea of using dots to construct the design with a grid, much like we have done in previous projects. It was important to me that the pattern aesthetically went with Koinonia and did not over power the typeface.
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