Alphabet Soup - Illustrator Typeface

For my illustrator type face, I though it was best I chose one of the more simple designs since a couple of mine were pretty complicated, and I wouldn't know where to begin with doing the whole alphabet. I chose my adaptation of shattered glass:

I had a pretty clear idea of how I was going to do this, despite not often using illustrator. I used Tahoma 140pt for a simple but adaptable typeface to manipulate. I used a simple uppercase letter and used the line tool to create a spectrum of lines from the bottom left hand corner across the rest of the letter, breaking it up into segments.

 I changed the colour of the letter and lines to a light grey so that I could use them as a template. Using the pen tool in black I outlined each segment and moved them in a random fashion along the line that segmented it, adjusting the size accordingly.

It took quite a while to make sure that every segment was perfectly aligned with the template, and the adjustments made to the size sometimes made them fall out of line. I tried to keep them as aligned with each other as possible and made some adjustments when the whole letter had been done.

When I deleted the template I was left with warped and fragmented version of each letter. With some of the more simple letters I tried to incorporate more fragments than others, to keep them dynamic and not appear less intricate than some of the more complicated shapes.

I had in my mind that I was going to keep the shapes white with a black outline, but since some of fragmented parts were very difficult to keep in line with each other I looked at making the outline black with a white outline. This immediately changed my mind as they were already seemed to have more impact than the white version.

While I was happy with this outcome, the less complicated letters still looked quite bland and uninteresting. Luckily, by accident I drew a white line across the V, and then tried scattering white lines all across the letter.

I added white lines randomly to each letter and found that they became so much more dynamic and interesting. It also exaggerated that it was meant to appear shattered, and when all put together, the typeface as a whole appeared smashed a broken down.

I am pretty pleased with the outcome of my typeface, although I would have loved to have been able to try one of the more complicated