Project #1 - Typographical Analogies

The stipulations for this project were to use type found in magazines with no alterations to make animals/objects. We were allowed 2 lines/dots/etc. that were not type to help the finished piece.

This project gave me some trouble to start, as I've never really thought of making anything out of type before. Having to use what I could find out of a magazine made it even more difficult.

As the possibilities of what you can do with Type appear to be endless and what you can find in a magazine is pure chance (I've noticed that capital J's are particularly hard to find), I decided to first come up with a list of items that I would like to make with type. This also proved to be a little difficult. Every animal I looked at appeared to have some lines or shapes that I could not find a letter to fit; more than I was allowed. At a loss, I decided to drive/walk around and see if I could find any objects/buildings that I had never noticed type in before.

My list after this drive was as follows:

Telephone pole
Fox
House
Wasp
Cat

After the drive, I pulled out a piece of tracing paper, wrote down some of the things from my list (such as Telephone Pole and Fox) and began searching through the stack of magazines for letters that I could use to make those shapes. Every time I came to a letter that I believed would work, I would trace it in the spot I wanted it to take in the object and would circle it in the magazine so I could cut it out and scan it in later.

Here is the results of some of my tracing:

Here, you can see the telephone pole and also a calf. The calf was completely by accident. I had been looking at an "A," as I felt that it would make a good head for my fox, but when I added a V to create the torso, I found it to look more like a fawn/calf. To the left of the calf you can see where I tried to find bigger letters in the same font. However, as I've said, pure chance. I didn't find any in my magazines that worked in the same way.


After a few hours of searching and tweaking, I finally had these two images complete and back-pedaled to cut out my letters and scan them in so as to achieve the same forms in Illustrator or Photoshop.

The resulting scan of the letters:

As an interesting side note, most of my letters came from Time magazine (as you may identify from the T). I suspect that it is mainly due to the fact that the majority of my forms are simple, requiring sans serif font. Food magazines appear to use more fonts with serifs and embellishments. Perhaps serif fonts appeal more to women than sans serif?


 My next step was to take the picture into Illustrator, release the clipping mask, and create a simple live trace, expanding it to move the letters around. I chose to use a simple Comic Art trace, rendering my letters black and white.


Seen Here:

Now, all that was left was to rearrange the letters into the patterns on the tracing pad.





Finished Product:

 Here we are! Now, to add some telephone wires and some nostrils to the calf, give them their own sheets, and perhaps blow them up to make them more visible. And wa-lah! Two completed Typogranalogies!

...Now which to use....




Thanks for reading!

Kayla