Message and Delivery Research

Having a vested interest in the topic of burglary, I chose to base my research on an article from Daily Express, about a 19 year old thief wh admitted to breaking in and burgling 278 separate homes between 2005 and 2011.

I looked further into youth crimes and found many similar articles about remorseless teenagers, many of whom were said to have possessed very arrogant attitudes when spoken to about their crimes. One article that stood out to me was the one below from last year, about a teenager who wrote a letter to the victims of his burglary claiming he was "not bothered" and that the whole ordeal was "their fault anyway".

The short letter he wrote reads as follows:

"Dear Victim, I don’t know why I am writing a letter to you! I have been forced to write this letter by ISSP.

“To be honest I’m not bothered or sorry about the fact that I ­burgled your house. Basically it was your own fault anyway. I’m going to run you through the dumb mistakes you made. Firstly you didn’t draw your curtains which most people know to do before they go to sleep.

“Secondly you're dumb you live in Stainburns a high risk ­burglary area and you're thick enough to leave your downstairs kitchen window open. I wouldn’t do that in a million years.

“But anyway I don’t feel sorry for you and I'm not going to show any sympathy or remorse.”

I began researching the sort of crimes people aged 10-17 are involved in, and found that while the rate of violent crime committed by juveniles had been decreasing since 1994, they account for a disproportionately large percentage of property arrests, with their percentage of robberies sitting at around 35%. The graph below shows the 12 most common non-violent crime, and the percentage of which youths are responsible in 1999.

To get a broader sense of more recent happenings as oppose to stats from over 10 years ago, I began researching into burglaries specifically. I found that an impressive percentage of violent crimes happen as a result of a burglar being interrupted, which surprised me because to my knowledge I thought a burglar would be as scared of the victim as the victim is of them.

While I believe that victims of burglary aren't in anyway deserving of what happens to them or are to blame at all, I do not believe that all victims can be faultless. Often in shared housing, people become careless, perhaps under the impression that someone else will take care of locking up the house. I looked up some information about opportunist burglars, those who will literally walk past a house, see lights off and an open window and make their way in, and in a lot of cases doors are left unlocked and occasionally completely open, allowing burglars to literally let themselves in. A large percentage of burglars will come through a front or back door, some a bottom floor window, and surprisingly, some will manage to enter through the basement.

I also found that a majority of burglars will return to the house they robbed some weeks or months later, taking the replacement laptops, cameras, phones, house keys etc., bought in place of those that were last taken and, given the amount of times I have found that this has happened, victims of burglaries aren't taking the necessary precautions to ensure it wouldn't happen again.

Alphabet Soup Part 2 -Product

In the end I had quite a bold and strong looking typeface, and when told we were going to be putting our typeface on an existing product, I don't know why but I immediately thought of Boost chocolate bars.

I drew out the word boost in the typeface I designed for Suzie and used this as an opportunity to join all of the type together. It didn't turn out too legible but I thought that once I scanned it in and played around with it a little bit I could make it easier to read.

I scanned it in and fiddled around with the colour, knowing that on a Boost bar the text is white. I tried some browns and blues but ultimately settled on the white as it did give the typeface a more distinct shape and made the edges appear very sharp.

I got a plan image of a Boot bar of the internet and deletend the text in the middle so that the white from that wouldn't get in the way of the white on my image.

I had to fill the brown colour and the centre with one simple shade of brown as when i only filled in the missing part with one colour it still allowed the text to stand out. This did make it look a little unrealistic but had I left it then the type would have been made much less clear and legible. I positioned the type simply onto the top of the image of the boost bar and fiddled around with it to make it fit properly.

Overall I was fairly pleased with it. It was difficult to make this type work as a logo as the whole nature of the type is quite fragmented and hard to decipher. I tried to keep as much shape in the letters as I could and I think that I did well to adapt it. Although this could be because I've spent so much time looking at it, I found that I was having less trouble recognising it over time, so the more I was looking at it the more readable it became.

Summer brief

Initially I had difficulty trying to interpret the Summer brief, but as I wasn't left with much time to do it, I just gathered research from some of my favourite designers, all of which I feel my own work is heavily influenced by:

Some of my favourite type designs from the past couple of years have been part of the Nike advertisements. Each of them are so dynamic and varied, managing to depict speed, agility, stamina etc. simply in a typeface. I love that the letters are able to speak as much if not more than the words themselves.

These styles each have something so significant and different about them, and as a result i decided i wanted my typeface to depict something in their form as oppose to being a component to a message delivered by words.

I felt like I couldn't develop a lot of these examples that I tried so I looked back at some of the Nike research I did and tried adapting existing typefaces and warping them into something else. I used the same idea of depicting a word and I chose 'speed', not because I'm a fast runner or anything like that, simply because I had to work quickly since I only had a week to finish it. This Proved surprisingly simple, I just broke apart characters and flicked the ends to the left, to make it appear as though they were moving quickly.

I did two variations of each letter and chose the one i thought looked more dynamic. The whole typeface worked pretty well at the end, I was pleased that I was able to adapt one one word to all of them effectively and I thought they complimented each other well. I would love to go back to this typeface an use it in a future project, or adapt it to fit something else as I was really happy with how it turned out.

Alphabet Soup Part 2 Evauation

Overall, I am pleased with the final outcome of my typeface, I think that keeping it in black and white contributed more to it. I tried to ensure it captured some elements of Suzie's personality, without having a lot going on at once.

It was difficult to keep the typeface simple while including the dynamics and sharpness of the style, as I didn't want it to seem overcrowded. In some of the letters (eg, K, M) I think I went a bit overboard with the design and on a large scale, in the picture below, the seem almost unrecognisable from their original form.

I briefly explored looking at architectural structures, stacked letters and letters designed on squared paper, like a grid, but found that these designs look much like some of the work I had seen of Suzie's. After unsuccessfully trying to adapt them to look less like her own work, I looked into some of the work of Suzie's favourite designer, Peter Saville. Much of his work included very sharp elements, all intersecting, which I felt similarly reflected Suzie's architectural style I lightly based the letterforms on Tahoma in order to keep it simple, as my design was becoming quite complicated. Someone mentioned to me after I had finished drawing up the typeface that I should try connecting them all, which I did with Suzie's name badge.

I missed the final crit, so have quite limited opinions from others. Although i was pleased with the final outcome, I would hope that another time I would be able to convey more of Suzie's personality other than the styles she works in and enjoys. Similarly I would have liked to explore joining the letters together further.

Alphabet Soup - Part 2 PowerCrit

In this weeks crit we presented our work to Amber, Simon and the 5 other group members. I was pretty much set on my idea before the crit, having researched a lot of initial ideas and landed on something that resembled the work of Peter Saville, my partner Suzie's favourite designer.

Some of my initial ideas were a bit unrealistic, for example one type face I designed was meant to be seen from above but it many of the letters weren't recognisable and a large amount of them looked the same. I briefly toyed with the idea of adapting famous buildings into letters to exaggerate Suzie's interest in architecture but I realised that not only would that go slightly off topic, since she may not be interested in the buildings i used, but I would also simple not have enough time to research and design 32 different buildings for each form.

This was when I started looking into Peter Saville and found that I could easily transform elements of his distinctive style.

Points I will work on after the crit feedback:

• Explore the use of other typefaces as a base
• Experiment with adapting designs to lowercase letterforms
• Try to include more than one element of Suzie's personality in the designs
• Explore some of the other designs before I completely settle on this one - more design sheets to experiment

Visual Research for Alphabet Soup Part 2

After doing some initial brainstorming, I was finding that the type I was producing was starting to look similar to each other, with little variation, and having seen some of Suzie's work from the last crit, it was difficult not to interpret her own ideas so I tried to start again. I started my research by looking into the work of Peter Saville, Suzie's favourite designer, knowing that a similar style to his would be reflective of what she finds interesting. Much of his work is very angular and minimalist, which i tried to incorporate into some of the designs I stated producing.

Work by Suzie's favourite designer, Peter Saville

The work i was producing was starting to resemble that of 70's and 80's rock band logo's, particularly when I had the letters joined to each other so I started to look into typefaces used for album covers:

Alphabet Soup Part 1 Crit

Crit

In a group of 11, we each briefly explained our ideas behind the work and present it to the others. From this the others chose the top 5 that fitted the brief the best, which from my selection ended up being the F, E, E, A and M. I agreed with their decision that these were the most fitting.

Once each member of the group stuck their top 5 on the wall, we rotated to another table to narrow the their 55 down to the 5 most fitting and best executed. Bearing in mind that we all had quite varied ideas of what was the best, it was fairly easy to narrow them down, choosing only one in the end that was the best of the group.

I liked the idea of an elimination process in this crit as it forced everyone in the group to be involved in the decision making and the varied opinions allowed me to see things from another persons point of view.

Alphabet Soup - Part 1

We were each given a word that we had to illustrate through a typeface, my word was 'shatter'. I looked some shatter synonyms to see how I could manipulate the word:

blast
blight
burst
 crack
crash
crunch
crush
dash
demolish
destroy
disable
exhaust
explode
fracture
fragment
impair
implode
overturn
pulverize
rend
rive
ruin
scrunch
shiver
smash
smash
smatter
snap
splinter
split
torpedo
wreck

With a selection of these words in mind, I chose to adapt Helvetica Bold, keeping it simple as I planned on making some exaggerated designs.

I explored two different routes with it, one being the more expected, shattered or cracked shards of glass. The other I looked at was shattered in terms of exhausted, tired, weakened. For this I made one N to appear as though it was deteriorating, and an H to appear tired. However neither of these seemed to illustrate the word effectively enough so I made more shattered glass designs.

I looked mostly at shards of glass for my designs as i thought that the designs would be more recognisable to be 'shattered' than the tired/deteriorated designs.

I think that spending more time doing research would have benefited this project greatly as i mostly just jumped right in and only ended up liking about half of my final designs, below. I think improving my time management is key here so that I know that I have done all i can. However, the top 5 that were chosen in the end were my favourites and in my opinion did successfully illustrate the word 'shatter'.