When given this brief my first initial thought was that it was going to be relatively hard to put across someones personality through an illustrative alphabet. It would be a challenge, but give me the opportunity to research into things and considering styles that I perhaps wouldn't have. It gives an opportunity to expand my creative ability through something I personally might never have thought about.
When asking my partner (Sean) about himself it was a bit of an information overload, which is a good thing but also a bad thing at the same time. It gives a huge amount of information and routes I could go down, but it also leaves me with the task of cutting it all down to the primary things that I want to get across in the typeface.
The main thing at this point that I didn't necessarily think about was the whole thing working well as a set. I thought about it in a sense of trying to get as much information about him in as possible. This meant that I was doing a different thing for pretty much every other letter, and in the end I know it would not have looked like a set at all.
However, when I narrowed it down to what I was going to focus on, it became much simpler and flowed into a set. Looking into stencil and skateboard-style graphics, it became pretty easy, just using straight lines and circles based on Swiss-style design work. This made it very easy to manipulate the style into each letter and create the alphabet. There were a couple of letters which I found difficult to do, the ones that had more than one join or had half-curves in them. The 'G' was particularly hard to do as it had both, a curve and a complicated join.
Looking back at the final alphabet there are certainly a few things I would do differently. I made changes to five of the letter: G, S, X, N, Y. However, looking over that one, there are still changes I wish I had made during the design process. The main one is that the thickness of the black lines in each letter varies. For example, the 'H' lines are a lot thinner than the 'J' ones. I think if I could go back and change it, I would make all the lines as thick as the 'J' as it fits in a lot more with the circular letters than the others.
Overall I am happy with the final outcome and enjoyed the process. I surprised myself at how easy I could take one thing that Sean said and create a whole alphabet based on it, and manage to keep it interesting, with each letter having their own uniqueness. I feel I have developed my typography and Adobe Illustrator skills throughout this brief, and have a clearer understanding in typography and how I can manipulate it.
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