Kyle Burgess
Graphic Designer
Decorative Font Design
Overview
Concept: Using a combination of Adobe Illustrator and FontLab, These projects resulted in custom-made fonts that could be used for a variety of different purposes. Encouraged to experiment with our fonts, the class was instructed to create letterforms by hand (illustrated or hand-cut), from found sources, and through digital manipulation. Each method resulted in different font styles that presented new challenges and opportunities for designs.
Description: Custom font-faces
Discipline: Digital Imaging, Typography
Found Font Design
The first font that I created was made up of letter forms cut from a variety of different sources. Titled "Manic", this illustrative-font is made up of letter forms that deviate in weight and style– giving the users' text a sporadic and intense tone.
I began designing this font by first collecting a large amount of letter forms cut carefully from magazines. Once I had gathered a sufficient amount of each letter, I then organized and pasted them to a sheet of paper which was then scanned and uploaded into Adobe Illustrator.
This font was created by simply cropping off portions of letter forms. Doing so allowed the letters to be stacked and kerned tightly. The thick letter forms that make up this font express a bold and modern tone. Continuing to work with this font, I found the letterforms to be great canvases for further manipulation.
Cropped Font Design
Hand-Drawn Design
This font consists of hand drawn letter forms that were uploaded into Adobe Illustrator, vectorized, and then exported to Fontlab where it was turned into a usable font. My thought process behind this design involved creating a font that could be used to make short sequences of decorative letters– opposed to a font that could be used for paragraphs.
