I found this brief to be particularly enjoyable and a learning experience. It has definitely been the brief which has pushed my exploration in typography and typeface design to a much more technical level, meaning I have had to be extremely precise and careful with every element of this brief.
When I created the initial typeface in January, I had been quite convinced that it was as good as it was going to get, however through learning much more about typeface design since then I found that I was confidently able to take the original typeface and edit it to create a much more sophisticated and consistent design across all characters. This resulted in a typeface which I am actually extremely happy with in the fact that all letters work together well and it can be used for body copy. Previously my typeface designs have not been quite up to the standard of being able to use for anything other than their original intention or just laid out in A - Z, however this typeface is something that can be used.
This brief has also showed me a good way to work through creating a typeface as it has shown me the right way about going about creating characters and how to create a consistent appearance instead of just thinking about how an individual character will look. Building on this and creating weight and style variations is something I enjoyed as it allowed me to push the design and consider more about the appearance than just creating one variation would.
The part of this brief which I enjoyed the least was actually turning it into a useable typeface. This is a long and tedious process in inputting all the characters before having to kern each letter and numerous pairs. However this has definitely aided my skills in this area of typeface design. I was previously quite inexperienced at this, having only done it a couple of times before to a very mediocre level. As I wanted to actually use the typeface in creating the specimen book, I knew I had to spend the time to kern properly and set up the documents properly so it could be useable.
Creating the typeface specimen publication was a bit more of a task than I initially thought it would be. I had to spent time considering how I wanted it all to be presented and what the key elements were. A big issue I found was that because I had three different styles and four weights, it created a lot of content that needed to be shown with twelve different variations. This made is tricky, however I am happy with how I edited this down to show the key points and aesthetic decisions in each variation. Overall I think that the specimen really does show the typeface off well.
The original aim of this brief was to create a useable, readable contemporary typeface, and I do feel that I have done this. I was initially very skeptical that I could manage to do it, but through hard work and a lot of time I do think the typeface is something to be proud of. This is definitely the brief where I feel I have accomplished the most as I have learnt so much through the whole process. It has given me the confidence and skills to be able to move forward and create more typefaces, and make them fully useable.
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