Curved and warped text to symbolise a . A soft delicate pastel shade with a pixelated filter on top to give a gentle sparkling effect. Sweet as in ‘a sweet little girl’
A more modern take on the word. Teenage talk, sweet as bro! Bright, bold with the w emphasised to mimic how they exaggerate the sound.
. Rather than having all the letters swaggering I thought that enlarging and distorting just the ‘gg’ would be as effective, and it was. I pictured legs, strutting.
Originally, I had all the text in shades or purple but by experimenting with the hue and saturation I was happier with the contrasting results. Purple suggests flashy clothes and arrogance through fashion!
Red for emphasis with an upwards slant and motion blur to suggest movement and . Second, I tried bold, black text with a drop shadow. Both designs work and suggest movement.
Black background so that I could make the text white. The Leopard skin font works well to depict . But my preferred design is the white text in playful blue circles created using the ellipse tool. The blue provides a cold feel against the white text and background.
I experimented with varying amounts of text for effect along with different sized typeface. Started off with black but changed this with skin tones. Design is up to your interpretation!
Fun, font infilled with a hot pink and surrounded in a bright, contrasting red. Encapsulates silly nicely.
Varying sizes and effects such as drop shadows. Experimented with the composition of the text. I quite like the grey S with the ‘ad’ coming out of the top of the S. Eventually I went for distortion to represent a contorted miserable facial expression, with shadows as a metaphor for general melancholy. Depressing…
written in a ‘safe’, no fail typeface. Located in the centre of the page as the word feels confident and has no need to prefer a corner.
y
short and dumpy. Horizontal expansion to the characters provides a visual resonance with the meaning of the word. An hour glass figure of a letter.
Streamlined. Think Ford Sierra 1989 with a massive spoiler!
tucked away in the corner, not fully visible. Didn’t want to go smaller to avoid losing the readability. Went caps to avoid losing the tail on the y when pushing the character off the page
I thought brown food and Greggs. Added some texture to the letters and then coloured the doughnut with chocolate and sprinkles. Greasy, comforting and bulging with bloating carbs. In hindsight should’ve used a more rounded typeface. But had fun adding shadows and highlights to the doughnut.
Skinny, compact thin letters. On the edge of readability.
Bold, outspoken and opinionated. These words are literally black and white – there is no colour because sardonic words are metaphorically cold and bleak.
Think playful, energetic and entertaining. A comic style font does away with seriousness and the distortion adds a burst of cheeky movement. .
serious, studious, formal. There’s a smudge of the y of the left hand image, suggesting a hand-written blemish.
Bold and unembellished font for clarity and urgency. In the version above I used the typeface exclamation mark as the border for the text to give it additional imperative.
The red stroke and skew is interesting but I think it could use some drop shadow or 3D depth at that low angle.
Here I inverted the colours and played with the stroke colours to give a sense of urgency. The rotation doesn’t work too well in insolation – it needs a context.
Cliched? Unseen shadow letters cast a shadow. I chose a font that would not become unreadable when shown in perspective but the loss of x-height in h and d is noticeable and needs further work, in hindsight.
I love this bold sans text. Pushing the O and W slightly out of frame creates a dynamic feel and the dark grey with a hint of purple gives a hint of colour and avoids the unsubtle impact of solid black against the background.
I rasterised the text and drew straight white lines of a range of thicknesses over it to give a sense of breakage. Below I fragmented the first letter by dragging the pieces outwards. I left the remainder of the letters to keep the word legible.
The pointilise filter added an interesting effect but introduced unwanted colours, so I slapped a black background on and then messed about until the pin light blending mode gave this broken and cracked final effect.
Mint leaves provided the inspiration here. A mint leaf vector gave me the shapes I wanted and two tones of green with a clipping mask did the rest of the job. Smaller font size needed to fully fit the mask but there is a trade off with legibility, so for this piece I accepted the slight lack of fit to the mask. I rotated the text direction to align it better with the stems in the leaf. I think this improves the look.
A chance to come over all Audrey Hepburn. Yes please. Loving the purple letters below, with the text size change and perspective and skew. Fun to make. In hindsight a gradient across the text might give more depth?
I went Greek inspired here to give a hint of old money sophistication. I mean, Clare’s Accessories isn’t going to cut here. Kept the text black as gold or silver metallic effects (which I tried) look tacky. This is a classy bird.
I thought I’d do these at the same time. For stiff I thought building materials and used an eroded font quite creatively by inverting a very large exclamation mark and turning it in to a wall.
Sordid is a headline from the Sun or Daily Mirror, so I went red and bold and shouty.
My weekly trip to the psychiatrist inspired me to think chaise lounges. I traced an outline from a rather expensive Italian one I found online and then fitted the text along the curve. Colour inversion gave two options for this text, which needed no further adjustment because of its simplicity.