A holiday well spent

After the seemingly unending blah in the last post, I thought I should show you some of my typographic work with a little less backstory. The plane journey and my first few days in Cyprus were spent doing some hand-drawn typographic work. I started on the plane with a few diagonal letters in a didone font (high contrast, a class created by Didot and Bodoni), a result of boredom and being left alone with a Telegraph Magazine for too long in the flight. Doubtless to say I got a few funny looks, but the results were some of the best hand-drawn characters I've made. Serif fonts are much easier than sans-serifs to draw out because the serifs help to balance the letters out and the high contrast between thin and thick strokes is easy to represent with a single pen line as the former.

The first pages, which have no good characters other than a flimsy M and W.  I was totally ignorant of the actual form of the N, but we'll see that recitfied later. Also note the wrong emphases on the V and U. Early days.

The next page, and I ventured into unlikely territory for me -  lowercase. After a few tries at the holy grail of calligraphy - the g - I realised I was doing it the wrong way round and had a decent try. The j and y also came out nicely, with the strokes smoothly drawn. The older form of the j with the flat tail looks much better than the one with the ball terminal, to me.

The third page, with some successful Ws and an alright f - the ball terminal just needs to be more tucked in under the ascender. Everything else is poor.

After a little more experimentation, here are some of the 'final' results that I put in my Moleskine:

Some of the basic letters - unfortunately I achieved a better W in the first drawings, but ah well.

Some lowercase letters, using the diagonal top strokes on the bodies of the n, k and i which I was pleased with. The curve on the n is kinda awkward, though.

After some more drawings of Ns and squinting at the Telegraph Magazine (which uses a didone font in its titles) I realised that the bottom-right corner of the letter was a point, not seriffed as previously thought. That realised, I created a decent N and an M to go with it.

So those were my typographic doodles last week. I also did some drawings of cubes and shapes in isometric, which didn't turn out too well:

But which happily led to the geometric shapes in 'Resort',  which turned out very well (or should do when the film is developed). Here's one of many pages of planning I did for the project; this one mainly covers the shapes I made for the photoset and the nets involved. For the record, the three-quarter sphere drawn at the bottom didn't work, but was a fun idea.

And that's all I have to show you for now. Have a great end-of-summer and I'll blog again soon!

~John