Arts 246 Process Journal by NancyHubright

Nancy Hubright Arts 246 Process Journal

Acknowlegement Professor Chi, Thank you for all your work this semester. I was glad to learn more about typography and layout in general, which I previously considered a weak point in my design. I hope to have you for another graphic design and illustration course. Thank you,

Statement of Intent Graphic Design and Illustration faulty, I wish to join the University of South Carolina’s Graphic Design and Illustration program as a Studio Arts major with a concentration in Graphic Design. While I originally aimed to be a marketing major, I have decided to fully pursue graphic design because I realized that I have an innate desire to create. Personally, I believe that this privilege of designing is worth the overtime and creative stress that a designer experiences daily. Thank you for viewing my process journal as well as application and I look forward to possibly working and learning with each faculty member.

Thank you,

Table of Contents

Project 1 - Kerning Exercise Pg 8 -11

Acknowlegement & Statement of intent

Project 2 - Typography Posters

Pg 3-5

Pg 12 -17

Project 3 - Zine

Project 5 - Make/Remake

Pg 18 -23

Pg 30 -35

Project 4 - Process Journal Pg 24 -29

Project 1 - Kerning Exercise For week 1 of class, I was unable to get to a printer before this post was due, but I able to get some French curves for my kerning assignment. Upon watching professor Nance’s tutorial, I began to appreciate the precision that comes with drawing letter forms.

I theorize that the French curves will take some getting used too. I doubt is it is similar to using specialty rulers like when I was in elementary school. Additionally, I am excited to use my light board to do the tracing.

Project 1 - Tight Kerning

Project 1 - Correct Kerning

Project 1 - Wide Kerning

Project 1 - Kerning Exercise Admittedly, I have not used it much since I got it. This assignment will not only help me to understand the concept of kerning, but the anatomy of letterforms as well as sentences.

Project 1 - Process Image 1

Project 1 - Process Image 2

Anatomy Inspired by John Baskerville, Firmin Didot also made use of the Baskervilles earlier modernizations that allowed him to achieve the thin stokes of the typeface. These slender strokes are accompanied by contrasting curves and bowls. Finally, the Didot is completed with minimal serifs that are directly perpendicular to the many portion of the letterform.

Visual Impact The anatomy of the typeface, with its narrow and chunky letterforms contributed to look and feel of mid-century American fashion. Equally, the letterforms themselves seem to mimic the appearance of the western ideal female body. Although Didot is an aesthetically pleasing typeface, arguably its influence on modern typography speaks louder than the contrast of its strokes.

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Works Cited Hart, Dana. “Firmin-Didot: A French Legacy.” The Met Museum, https:// www.metmuseum.org/blogs/in-circulation/2015/firmin-didot. Accessed February 3, 2021. Kiley, Anther. “Didot: Enlightened Refinement.” Coursera, uploaded

Didot

by California Institute of the Arts. https://www.coursera.org/l ecture/typography/didot-enlightened-refinement-KWc5x. Lupton, Ellen. Thinking with Type: A Primer for Designers: A Critical Guide for Designers, Editors and Students. New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.

Overview Being the first modern typeface, Didot continues to be relevant since its creation in 1784 by Firmin Didot. Because of its elegantly minimalistic aesthetic, the typeface is utilized by entities such as Vogue, Louis Vuitton and CBS. The creation of Didot along with its close relative, Bodoni, would usher in the modern era and found the Modern Serif type family.

History Firmin worked alongside his brother, Pierre Didot to run their father’s punch cutter press. What differentiated the Didots from other presses was their specialization in making ornamental books. Since the typeface was created pre-French Revolution, the brothers especially catered to the wealthy class and royal court.

Enlightenment Influence While their books still functioned as books, the Didots included illustrations and premium binding, which all amounted to the book itself being seen more as a piece of art. To further cater to their clients during European Enlighten, Didot designed a radical new typeface, which conveys elegance in its cleanliness and innovation through its mathematical structure.

Project 2 - Informational Didot Poster

Project 2 - Typographic Posters After completing my Kerning Exercise assignment, I began my first major longterm design project. Tuesday, my class and I were tasked with creating two posters that are centered around a typeface family. For my posters, I chose the typeface, Didot. I was drawn to Didot because of its modern aesthetic and dramatic strokes within the letterforms. The first step in this project was to create a mood board to initiate my research and develop my visual design.

Interestingly, I found that Didot is used, or at least variations of it, by brands like CBS, Louis Vuitton and Zara. Personally, all of these entities are very different. This fact seems to speak to the typeface’s universality. I seems like it functions like a quality leather jacket. One can either dress it down or dress it up. Similarly, Didot seems to push creative boundaries, while are appearing traditionally professional.

Project 2 - Conceptual Didot Poster

For our typography posters project, I was able to do a bit more research and finish my informational essay on the Didot typeface. It was interesting to do this case study on single font. What was surprising to me was Didot’s influence on the modern world. Being influenced by the European Enlightenment, Didot certainly reflected the rational, yet innovative thinking of 18th century France.

Unfortunately, I have not made much progress on the the poster itself, but I did find some more inspiration for both the informational and conceptual posters. Since Firmin Didot made this typeface for him and his brother’s elegant books, I thought that I should include book elements to the posters or at least the green cover that many articles use as an example for a Didot book.

Project 2 - Moodboard

Project 2 - Informational Process

Project 2 - Initial Sketches

Project 2 - Conceptual Process

Project 2 - Typographic Posters One of my favorite assignments is making posters. This past week I spent designing both my informational and conceptual poster. In the image bellow, I immediately tried to replicate my sketch, which featured a strict yet visually engaging design. Like the Parisians before me, I hope to achieve an elegant, yet visually striking design with this first draft.

This coming week I will plan on formatting the essay in my information poster and perfect my conceptual design. For both designs I will play a bit more with color since I want to keep my designs more minimalistic. I am even considering using the gold as the main color for one of the posters to differentiate the two more clearly.

Project 2 - Didot Typographic Poster Mockup

This week I wrapped up my typographic posters project. Since my last entry I fully dedicated myself to the using the color scheme from one of the Didot brothers’ book. Using some suggestions from my fellow classmates, I made my striped letter design my informational poster. This allowed there to be more text-friendly space. Additionally, this presented a new challenge for me in designing the conceptual poster.

Ultimately, it was for the better because I was able to creatively use the various letter is the word “Didot” to create an astronomical scene that reminds me of the Age of Enlightenment and French curiosity. Next week I will look to working on project 3 and creating a mood board.

Project 3 - Zine This week I turned in my mood board for Project 3. After thinking about my zine’s ascetic, I began to define the topic for zine by doing so research. Because I used to play soccer, I already had a beginning understanding of the origin of soccer cleats and as well as the different types along with their specific functions.

While researching, I found that their appearance and performance qualities where the most interesting aspect to me, so I will certainly touch on those aspects when writing my essay. Finally, with a bit more research completed, I began to place the guides in my InDesign file and play with the organization of the Zine.

Project 3 - Zine Front Cover

Project 3 - Illustration Process

Project 3 - Table of Contents Process

Project 3 - Inital Front Cover Sketches

Project 3 - Zine These past two weeks I freshened up my essay and established the main layout of my zine. After laying the ground work in InDesign, I began designing in Illustrator. There I used the pen tool to recreate iconic soccer cleats for my timeline, a diagram for the anatomy portion of my zine and finally a few other illustrations to tie the visual identity together.

For the final week of working on my zine, I will make edits that I spotted after printing, create a few more illustrations and at last add a splash of color to my design to convey the energetic feeling that sports bring.

Project 3 - Table of Contents (Left side)

For this past week, I finally finished my zine. Thankfully, the week before was very productive, so for week 9 was was able to focus on polishing my zine as well as making some new illustrations to tie the project together.

Personally, I found that I have improved my process of designing a layout, so that aspect of the project was satisfying for me. That left me with lots of time to illustrated and test out some text layout combinations. Likely, the hardest part for me was trying to incorporate color into my design. This was strange for me because when I draw things by hand blending and color theory comes much easier to me as opposed to digital design where I tend to focus on the bones of a design. As a result, most of my zine stayed black and white with paintbrush texturing to give the visual interest that color would have provided.

Project 4 - Process Journal This week I turned my attention to my final project, which is a process journal. I spent time finding inspiration for the look and feel of my design and I think I settled on a minimalistic space theme. I chose this because when I was young, I was always facilitated with pictures from the Hubble Telescope. Additionally, my classmates thought that the theme went with the observatory imagery from my type poster.

Finally, I was able to establish the general layout and grid system for my journal. As a result, my journal has 34 pages, including the front and back cover. Additionally, I set up a 6 row and 9 column grid system to elaborate on the Rule of Thirds.

Project 4 - Process Journal Front Cover

Project 4 - Zine Divider Spread

Project 4 - Process Journal This week I continued to organize the layout of my process journal and begin illustrating for the chapter dividers. Since my theme is space, I decided to replace my usual white space with deep space, which was created with a very dark grey and tiny white points to represent stars. Floating around in alternating pages are several different colored spacemen who are in several dynamic poses that somehow related to each project.

For the coming week, I will look to add the remaining images of all my completed projects so that I can better establish the layout of my journal. Then I will return to illustrator to create some more illustrations that I will spread throughout the journal to really tie in the theme of space. These designs will be minimal to keep the focus on my work form this semester.

Project 4 - Divider Process

Project 4 - Process Spreads Part 1

Project 4 - Back Spread Process

Project 4 - Table of Contents Process

Project 4 - Process Spreads Part 2

Project 5 - Make and Remake Collaborating and designing on this group project, I certainly got a taste of how life as a designer will be like. I think that every design student should have to collaborate at least once so that they are able to handle working with clients. In art school, such students have the ability to test their teamwork skills with other creatives, which is a much easier starting point.

The biggest challenge in this project was tightening up our initial designs to make sure they were consistent parts of a single alphabet. Specifically, I worked on the letters “M” through “T”. While working, I had a difficult time designing the letter “O” because of the group’s choice to only use a semicircle. Eventually, I was able to line up all the points so that each stroke has a smooth transition.

Project 5 - Make and Remake Alphabet Mockup

Project 5 - Make and Remake Word Mockup

Project 5 - Alaphabet Initial Ideas

Project 5 - Make and Remake In addition to the actual design aspect of the project, the group communication part was fairly easy compared to other projects that I have been involved in. I was especially thankful to be partnered with Fabiana because we both served as effective co-team-leaders. Emma and Kianna were also good! My given group definitely made the project much easier than it could have been.

Overall because of this project, I learned that communication has an immense effect on group projects. It can be the difference from enjoying the process to wishing for the due date to come swiftly.

Project 5 - Alphabet Process 1

Project 5 - Alphabet Process 2

Nancy Hubright Arts 246-002 Professor Catherine Chi University of South Carolina Columbia, SC April 2021 Header 1 - Cabin Semicondensed Italic 18pt Header 2 Cabin Italic 18pt Body - Cabin regular 10pt Caption - Cabin regular 8pt