OUGD403 Studio Brief 1 - Alphabet Soup

For the first studio brief we were told to use the chosen font we decided that was most relevant to us from the previous task to adapt into a font of our own and make all of our adaptions around the word that we selected at random at a later point.

As we all looked blatantly confused the tutors helped us out by giving us an insight into what we needed to do we split up into groups and were given a word by the tutors to have a practice at what we were going to do.

We were given the word Technical.

We decided to start out our insight into the word by making a spider diagram and listing off words of which we believe related to out given word;

With this method it is a very quick an easy way to adapt a single words in to a large selection of ideas to use.

I was then given my word of which I would have to use for the actually us for the adaption of my typeface, the word I was given was;

mechanical |mɪˈkanɪk(ə)l|adjective1 operated by a machine or machinery: a mechanical device.• relating to machines or machinery: the helicopters are prone to mechanical failure.2 (of an action) done without thought or spontaneity; automatic: she stopped the mechanical brushing of her hair.3 relating to physical forces or motion; physical: the smoothness was the result of mechanical abrasion.• archaic (of a theory) explaining phenomena in terms only of physical processes.• archaic relating to mechanics as a science.4 relating to the exclusive legal right to reproduce a particular recorded version of a song or piece of music: mechanical copyright | mechanical royalties.noun1 (mechanicals) the working parts of a vehicle.2 (usu. mechanicals) archaic a manual worker: rude mechanicals.[with allusion to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream .]DERIVATIVESmechanically adverb,mechanicalness nounORIGIN late Middle English (describing an art or occupation concerned with theconstruction of machines): via Latin from Greek mēkhanikos (see mechanic) + -al.

I then set off making a spider diagram around the word mechanical and it all come together to produce this;

The word mechanical worked immediately for me because it started spanning ideas in my head as soon as I started thinking of it, the ideas came flowing. This is good because i do know that some people seemed to struggle creating ideas from their word but mine seemed to work very well for me. 

With this at my side I started off creating some very rough initial ideas on a sort of really rough design board.

On this I just jotted down some very rough ideas that I developed from my research on the word mechanical. I started looking into creating work of which displayed the intricacy of which can be related to the word mechanical. One of my biggest initial ideas was based around the route of intricacy that I gained from my word mechanical. I had an idea to use a theory of the impossible triangle or also sometime called the Penrose triangle, the idea is that the side of the shape in this case the letters don't really work normally and the side of the shape never end. I then continued to jot ideas roughly on some design boards. We then had a group crit to identify what other people though was good and bad about the designs. I then after a while of making rough ideas and working with the feedback give set out starting to make my final initial idea's, in the end I created 15 solid ideas of which I was going to take through as my final ideas.

The feedback I was given was that I should look into the fact that mechanical can be linked into machinery and that I should look into using cogs and gears to resemble machinery. Furthermore form this idea i should look at the fact of things fitting together and should look at puzzles and jigsaws. Furthermore could my design where it looks like a maze could it be made from one line the entire thing and could I link it to circuitry and circuit boards. Finally I was advised to look into textures in my lettering and also look into of the letter that it plot apart could it be split into more parts.

With my feedback I also created some of my other letters from this notion of intricacy by using a lot of small and over-crossing lines to create the effect of patterns and this gave the notion of intricacy. I also looked at some other route that I took from my word machinery, the first of these avenues that I also discovered was the heavy and robust connotation to mechanical, so I designed the three designs, the middle and the top right of the right hand picture and the middle of the second row down in the same picture.  I designed these with the intention in mind that they would be heavy and robust but simple. The final avenue that I went down was down the route of a more literal look at mechanical and I designed the letter made up of machinery cogs and puzzle parts.