In these sessions I started the initial stage in the development of my letterforms and eventually my full alphabet by making all of my letterforms the approximate size of my grid and then turning the text into a shape in illustrator by selecting the create outlines function. After this meant I was able to edit the original helvetica base by moving the anchor points to make my new letters. When I had done this I had the finished final shape for my whole alphabet and could start now adding the extra lines I need to add to make my final designs by using the pen tool to give the desired effect.
I started making the final design additions to all of my letterforms of which only consisted of straight lines as i believed these would be the easiest way to start by using the rulers to measure off the start and finish points of the lines and then do the maths to find the centre points of the lines so I could start adding my desired effects. This became tedious and added a lot of extra time take to create my letterforms. After looking into illustrator help guides a little more on the internet I found this can be done much easier than the way I was doing it. By going into the setting and selecting the add anchor points option this added the centre points to the lines of which then made it much easier to do. At this point the rest of the letterforms with only straight components were much easier and I was finished with them in no time.
A big problem came along when I started creating the curved letters with the pen tool I was unable to replicate the curves smoothly enough and they were too jagged so I needed to find a better way than this to reproduce the curves.After a discussion on ways that I could do this better with my peers I was informed that the best way to do this would be to copy the letter and then use the curve I needed to recreate put it in place and then to edit the anchor point position so it fit to the letter more smoothly. This method was much better as it kept the same angle of curve so it flowed better with the original letter and only took a small amount of editing to make it fit to the letter. After discovering this technique the rest of the letters were much easier to make and they were finished in no time. When my whole alphabet of letter forms were made I fit them into a 4 by 7 grid as directed to by the deliverables for printing and to accompany this mad a document with my word spelled out in the font I designed, the definition of the word I was given (mechanical) and the grid that all my letterforms fit too.
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