Typographic Character as Form
This project aimed to create and iterate many character pairing compositions, resulting in five top designs based off of Carl Dair's Contrast Principles. A design process, within three steps, needed to occur to get to these final five compositions. These steps were choosing the typefaces and characters, creating one hundred twenty-five compositions of character pairs, and iterating on the total with five final designs in mind.
Step 1: Choose the Typefaces and Characters
In the first step of creating my compositions, I needed to choose typefaces and characters to iterate on later. I made an Illustrator file with a single artboard and decided on two sans serif and two serif typefaces to select my five characters from their alphabet later. These typefaces were Interstate, Futura PT, Baskerville URW, and Adobe Jensen. When I set their complete alphabets from A to Z in both uppercase and lowercase, I was able to see which five letters from the total number of fonts were the most interesting. I chose the letters B, A, E, G, and Q from the fonts Baskerville and Futura in my project. Those five characters that were either serif or san serif fonts were the ones I would move with to the second step, creating compositions of character pairs.
Step 2: Create One Hundred Twenty-Five Compositions of Character Pairs
In the second step of this project, I needed to create one hundred twenty-five compositions of character pairs to choose five from later on. I made five Illustrator files with twenty-five artboards for each alphabet character I chose previously in step 1 and used Carl Dair's principles of direction, size, form, weight, and structure for contrast. Once I had my one hundred twenty-five iterations, I chose five that were the most interesting/ effective. I further iterated them into twenty-five more options to move on to the third step, choosing five final character combinations.
Step 3: Choose Five Final Character Combinations
For this final step of the project, I had to choose my top five final character combinations from my 25 previous iterations. In my case, I decided on two character combinations from the letter E, one character combination from the letter A, one character combination from the letter G, and one character combination from the letter B. They were finalized based on if they displayed Carl Dair's contrast principles effectively.
