It all started with a collective class assignment of reviving a type specimen from 1745 titled J.M. Fleischman. (the original specimen can be seen in the top left of the image below) We were all given 5 glyphs to trace and digitize, for me it was ‘K’ ‘1’ ‘q’ ‘H’ and ‘b’.
Through the process of meeting as a group and discussing what we liked and what we didn’t while also trying to keep a consistency throughout we came to the creation of the final font titled ColRev.
With the typeface created we then had a series of assignments, the first of which was to create 3 layouts from the text taken from a chosen artist’s Wikipedia page. The artist I chose was one of my favorites, the great David Byrne. The 3 layouts were all to fit on letter sized pieces of paper and were to resemble 3 different types of media, a Magazine, Website, and a Phone Screen.
My approach to this assignment was to use a baseline grid that was so strict that it forced each line of type to be stretched to line above it. This created a type treatment that was solely visual, readability was not in any way an intention in these layouts. My strict baseline was also reinforced by my image treatment. I took the images featured in the Wikipedia article and bitmapped them to be a series of horizontal lines. I then stretched each image so that the lines were aligned with the grid.
The second assignment was to make to make a stencil of the font that we created to then physically print 2 posters of a made up exhibition for our chosen artist. since I chose a musical artist I decided to make concert posters for one of Bryne’s albums “uh-oh”. I was able to translate my technique of stretching text and images through creating my stencil with dividing lines so I can take a segment of the text/image and repeat it to give the look of stretching.