“A
letter can be anything, anything can be a letter,” was
a one week class in the Summer Design Intensive program at the California
College of the Arts, San Francisco..
Its intention was to reconstruct the alphabet, as an investigation
for a personal visual language. The graphic symbols of characters
derive from objects or abstracts, which have a specific reference
or value to carry information or to communicating ideas to others.
The students collected objects, ideas or other things of personal
importance or interest. They simplified them into a set of graphic
symbols, and glyphs, pictographs or 'logos' from
|
|
photographs or scans and
traced them in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator or Streamline. 26 designs
to assign to the capitals, 26 to the lowercases, and 10 to the numerals.
The designs then were imported into Fontographer, to create a working
font of their character set. With their font the students produced
pages for a collective font
catalog to communicate the story,
origin and philosophy behind their design. The last day, the students
created a short animation
( ) with these character
shapes, using Flash for authoring software.
Max Kisman, July 2003. |
