Task 2: Key Artwork

05/13/2025 / Week 4 - week 8

Khansa Raudlatus Syahiidah / 0374511

Advanced Typography / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media

Task 2: Key Artwork

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TABLE OF CONTENTS :

1. Lectures

2. Instructions

3. Process work

    3.1 Research

    3.2 Ideation

    3.3 Final outcome

4. Feedback

5. Reflection

6. Further Reading 

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1. LECTURES

Lecture week 4 : 

• Pre - recorded lecture : AdTypo_4_Designing Type

    Xavier Dupre (2007) in the introduction of his Typeface Malaga suggested two reasons for designing a typeface. 

    1. It carries a social responsibility so one must continue to improve its legibility

    2. A for of artistic expression

Advanced Typography: Designing type

    1. Aidan Frutiger

    Aidan Frutiger is a renowned twentieth century Swiss graphic designer. He was considered responsible for the advancement of typography to digital typography. His values contribution includes the typeface: Univers and Frutiger.

    2. Matthew Carter

• Royal designer for industry, contemporary British type designer and ultimate craftsman
• Trained as a punchcutter at Enschede' by Paul Radisch
• Responsible for Crosfield's typographic program in the early 1960s
• Many of his fonts were created specifically to address specific technical challanges (font ex. Verdana, 1996)

    3. Edward Johnston

• The creator of the hugely influentoal London "Underground" typeface, known as "Johnston sans" (1916)
• Johnston design, combined both classical Roman proportions with humanist warmth

General process of type design:

    1. Research

    - When creating type, we must understand type history, type anatomy, and type conventions

    - Also know terminologies, side-bearing, metrics, and hinting

    - Determine the type purpose / what it would be used for

    - Examine existing fonts that are presently being used for inspirations

    2. Sketching

    - Some designers start sketching traditionally (brushes, pens, ink and paper)

    - Some designers sketch straight up digitally

    3. Digitization

    - Software used to digitize typefaces, ex. FontLab & Glyphs app

    - Some designers uses Adobe Illustrator to design their letterforms before using the specialized font apps afterwards

    

    4. Testing

    - Part of the process of refining and correcting aspects of the typeface

    - Prototyping is also the testing process

    

    5. Deploy

    - Even after deploying a completed typeface, there are always teething method that did not come to the fore during the prototyping and testing fase

    - The rigour of the testing is important so that the teething issue remain minor

    

Typeface construction & consideration:

• Many different forms and constructions must be taken into account when designing a new type.
• An important visual correction is the extrusion of curved (and protruding) forms past the baseline and cap line.
• A visual correction is also needed for the distance between letters.

Lecture week 5 : 

• Pre - recorded lecture : AdTypo_5_Perception And Organisation

    Perception is "the way in which something is regarded, understood, or interpreted"

    Perception in typography deals with the visual navigation and interpretation of the reader via contrast, form, and organization of the content. Content can be textual, visual, graphical, or in the form of color.

    1. Contrast

    

Fig 1.1: Contrast

• Contrast is important to be able to create distinction or differentiation between information 
• To make reader easy to separate the different type of information

    Contrast / Size:

    - Provides point to which the readers attention is drawn

    Contrast / Weight

    - Describes how bold type can stand out in the middle of lighter type of the same style

    - Using bold, rules, spot, squares, also provide a "heavy area" for a powerful point of visual attraction or emphasis 

    Contrast / Form

    - Distinction between a capital letters and its lowercase equivalent / Roman letter and its Italic variant

    - Condensed and expanded versions of typeface are also included under the contrast of form

    Contrast / Texture

    - Textures refers to the way the lines look as a whole up close and from a distance

    

    Contrast / Direction

    - The opposition between horizontal and vertical, and angles in between

    - Turning one word on its side can have a dramatic effect on a layout

    - Mixing wide blocks of long line and tall columns can also create a contrast

    Contrast / color

    - The use of color is suggested that second color is often less empathic in values than plain black and white 

    - It is important to give thought to which elements need to be emphasized and to pay attention to the tonal values of the colors that are used

    

Form

    Typography can be seen as having 2 function:

        1. To represent a contract

        2. To do so in a visual form

• Displaying type as a form provide a sense of letterforms unique characteristics and abstract presentations
• The interplay of meaning and form brings a balanced harmony both in terms of function and expression

Organisation / Gestalt

    Gestalt theory emphasizes the whole of anything is greater than its parts - this is based on the idea that we experience things as unifies whole: instead of breaking down thoughts and behavior to their smallest elements, the Gestalt psychologist believe that you must look at whole to experience.

Perceptual organization / Grouping

    1. Law of similarity: States elements that are similar to each other tend to be perceived as unified group (refer to any number of features, including color, orientation, size, indeed motion)

    2. Law of proximity: States elements that are close together tend to be perceived as a unifies group 

    3. Law of closure: Refers to the mind's tendency to see complete figures or forms even if a picture is incomplete, partially hidden by other objects or parts of the information needed to make a complete picture in our minds is missing

    4. Law of continuation: Human tend to perceive each or more than two or more objects different, singular, and uninterrupted object when they intersect

    5. Law of symmetry 

    6. Law of simplicity

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2. INSTRUCTIONS

Fig 2.1: Module Information Booklet

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3. PROCESS WORK

Mood board & Inspiration:

Fig 3.1: Key Artwork inspirations

In the beginning of my key artwork process, it was important that I have an idea in mind on what keywords I want to use in creating my font. I started of with Magical, Fantasy. I also wanted to focus on showing off its curls and lettering. The inspirations above were some guide for me in achieving and accurate look based on my own keywords.

Fig 3.2: Color combinations ideas

    On week 7, I showed Mr. Vinod my final color choices. However, it was not approved and must be changed. Surprisingly, color choices did confuses me for some time as I was still clueless on what exact colors I want. I did try sticking with one permanent color where I would keep and change the others, doing it over and over until I have come up with another final color choices. That method did not turn out very well in my case. Therefore, I went to Pinterest and screenshotted color combination I thought are nice. I played around combing one after another, as well as following complementary colors. In the end, I was faced with a lot of options where I then started to eliminate one by one. I also asked feedbacks a couple times to my friend, and after many improvements, I then showed my final color choices to Mr. Vinod which was fortunately approved.

Initial sketches:

Fig 3.3: Key artwork sketch 1 (05.19.2025)

        Fig 3.4: Key artwork sketch 2 (05.19.2025)                    Fig 3.5: Key artwork sketch 3 (05.19.2025)

    These were all the sketches I came up with. I tries both blocks and curly type. However, I tried to stay consistent majorly on the curly designs. During our feedbacks in class, Mr. Vinod commented that a lot of my designs are not very clear and have not entirely portray the keywords I thought of.

Digitization: 

Fig 3.6: Key artwork first digitization (05..2025)

    As I have selected my final design, I started on digitizing them in Illustrator. Although I did have a different approach in the beginning, I manage to finalize my design and started to digitize and improve it.

Fig 3.7: Digitization progress with colors (05..2025)

    Before I was fully done with my final font, I also played around with colors. Initially, I thought that I can use this as my final look. However, after my feedback session I had with Mr. Vinod in class, I was told to continue focusing on spaces I had between each letters. I also tried improving the curls, thickness, and consistency.

Fig 3.8: Digitization progress to final (05.29.2025)-(06-16-2025)

    On my process of improving it, I used shape tool and pen tool in order to achieve and consistent and neat look. Using the ellipse tool, I tried using it as a guide in order to make a clean curve, and for pent tool, used in measuring spaced between letters. Although this method may not result in the most accurate measurement, it was still able to help me in creating a more even space.

Fig 3.9: Gift animation draft 1 (06.18.2025)

 

Final 2(A) - Key Artwork:

Fig 4.1: Black wordmark on white background (06.16.2025)

Fig 4.2: White wordmark on black background (06.16.2025)

Fig 4.4: Color palette (06.16.2025)

Fig 4.4: Wordmark in actual colors on lightest shade of color palette (06.16.2025)

Fig 4.5: Wordmark in lightest shade of color palette on darkest shade of color palette (06.16.2025) 

Fig 4.6: Final key artwork (pdf)

Fig 4.8: Final GIF animation (06.18.2025)

Final 2(B) - Collateral:

Fig 5.1: Collateral 1 (06.16.2025)

Fig 5.2: Collateral 2 (06.16.2025)

Fig 5.3: Collateral 3 (06.16.2025)

Fig 5.4: Instagram feeds layout (06.18.2025)

Fig 5.5: Instagram feeds (06.18.2025)

Fig 5.6: Final collateral (PDF) (06.18.2025)

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4. FEEDBACK

Week 4 : 

General feedback : We had our feedbacks on our Movie poster using the type & play font. After that, we were briefed on a new task in key artwork.

Week 5 : 

General feedback : After we have sketched a couple ideas of our wordmark, we put them together and post it in Facebook for feedbacks on what to improve. After that, we were given the time to continue improving our sketch before starting to digitize it. 

Specific feedback : Sketches shown for my initial key artwork design is to complex and not readable.

Week 6 : 

General feedback : We had an online feedback session showing our finalized logo (only black and white) and also a little exercise which was done during class.

Week 7 : 

General feedback : In this week, we focus on continuing our task 2 in class, Mr. Vinod also went around giving feedbacks on our work like the, collateral, color palette, key artwork and more other.

Specific feedback : Color choices needs to be changed and font design still needs to be improved (the word spaces).

Week 8 : 

General feedback : This weeks meeting was held online, where we were given feedbacks on our previous task before Mr. Vinod started on explaining our ne task (Task 3).

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5. REFLECTION

Experience : 

    Throughout my work process in task 2 (Key artwork), there were many things I learn to gain a better understanding of. For example, during the key artwork process, I spent quite some times in finalizing my color combination after my initial one was rejected my Mr. Vinod. As we were suggested to follow the complementary colors, I started going to Pinterest and selecting many color ideas I thought was nice. After that, I created many artboards in AI, going over and over with mixing color combos from all the ideas I saved. I also look into the complementary colors. After I have ended up with a couple options, I went to ask feedbacks to my friends before finally showing it to Mr. Vinod.

Observations :

    As I thought my key artwork was done and started moving on to collateral, Mr. Vinod gave me a little feedback on week 7 on letter spacing that are still inconsistent in my design. Therefore, I had to re-do them over starting with fixing my font. After I was done improving it, I realized that the difference they make from my previous design and after improving it played a big role. The consistent spacing they have in letters truly play an important role in aiming a clean and organized final design.

Findings :

    Overall, as my initial approach in the key artwork design was swirls and handwriting, I tried to put that look in my collateral by adding little swirl designs. Originally, my collateral used many of my fonts over and over making it look too crowded, however, I tried to simplify certain posts by putting only the letter "K" for example. This project were fun but also needed many exploration, both in research for ideas, and work progress before finalizing them.

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6. FURTHER READING

TYPOGRAPHY BASIC

Fig 6.1: Further Reading Article

Formatting styles

    With styles, or also known as style tags, the user can incorporate the types setting covered so far into a single format command.

    Major benefits in styles:

    1. They are great time saver because they condense 5-30 different settings into one (eliminating the possibility of user error).

    2. A change to a style will affect the applied text throughout the entire document, making "global" edits much quicker and easier.

Types of styles

• Paragraph styles: Effects the entire paragraph, even if the entire paragraph is not selected. Paragraph style will me the most common style used for general formatting. 
• Character styles: Only effect text that are selected; this could be one character, one word, or multiple words. Depending on the program, character styles can be applied when formatting editorial usage of bold and italic.

Based On and Next Style Usage

    When creating a styles sheet, the user should give the style a logical name, such as "Body-Master". Any style can be Based on an existing style, so only the differences need to be set. This also allows a cascading of styles.

    Another feature is the Next style option; this changes the style automatically to the another style after typing a return. For example, body copy could be set to follow the subhead. This feature only works when typing text directly in the program.

    Also, the option to give the style a keyboard equivalent applies the style with a single key stroke.

Type specification in Adobe programs 

    One of the benefits of working with Adobe programs is the similarity of the interface. For example, the type palette shown from Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, with some of the settings indicated. Although they have differences, they have a similar palette overall.