OUGD405 - Typogateaux

Typogateaux group:

Roxxie Blackham 

& 

Joe Leadbeater

Typogateaux Development

The 'Upside-Gingerbread House' & the 'Battenberg Press'

One of my initial ideas was a gingerbread house, but with a totally typographic twist.... I wanted to turn the house completely upside down, so that the slope of the roof made a 'v' (and so would be angled in such a way so it can't fall over), the candy-cane fence could be 'w's and 'j's ... the idea got really out of control! Since none of us in the group had actually made gingerbread before we researched into it and found out that there could be lots of things that can go wrong, especially if you've never made it before. We thought about the scale, and that to be effective it would have to be somewhat very large. We decided to not pursue this idea any further than paper.

Joe, another member in the group suggested his idea of making the 'Battenberg press' - a battenberg cake made to look like the lead pieces from a letterpress. We all really liked this idea, there was little chance of it going wrong. The only reason we didn't pursue this was because of our other idea was the most favoured...

'The Bauhaus Kuchen' ('the Bauhaus Cake')

Our final idea was to create "The Bauhaus Kuchen" (The Bauhaus Cake). We thought it's relevance to typography was through the fact that the Bauhaus played an important part in the start of Graphic Design through typography. We thought that although it was a building, it shouldn't be too dificult to execute because of its simple, cuboid shape. 
But we also wanted to consider the inside, because the Bauhaus is quite plain on the outside (white and grey).
At first, we envisioned the cross section of the cake to be a 'B' (in the bauhaus font) which we really liked, but then decided that the 'b' would have to be really long in length to run the length of the building, meaning we'd have to bake the whole building around it in one go.... and we didn't have a big enough tin.
We still wanted something clever on the inside, so we decided upon rainbow. The rainbow colours would represent the phrase associated with the Bauhaus: 'The centre of creativity'.
We also thought that the letters down the outside could be cut out of icing using printed out templates, and that the windows could either be; drawn on with writing icing or strips of white roll-out icing. Only experimentation could determine this.

The Bauhaus.

Experimentation of the Bauhaus Kuchen

We wanted to try out our ideas, in preparation for the final thing. 

Using a victoria sponge mix and several food colouring dyes, we separated  the mix into several different bowls and coloured each of the bowls differently:

And then poured them, at random into a large, ready-greased mixing tray:

After using all of the colour from the bowls, we put it into the oven, ensuring that the colours did not move around the tray.

When baked, the cake looked promising!:

Cutting the cake successfully revealed the rainbow insides!

But we did observe that the lilac/ purple we mixed using red and blue had come out greyish and bland in colour and so unappetising. We concluded that we would not use this in the final piece.

......annnddd due to a little over-excitement we applied the buttercream and jam a little bit too early and so it didn't set in the warm cake:

Things we found out after carrying out the test piece:

• purple/ grey is not a good colour.
• do not apply buttercream too early!
• be more systematic when pouring colours into tray, so definition of colours is clearer.

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The final Piece

following the same principles of the test piece, we created separate bowls of different colours then proceeded to pour them into the tray. But this time, we decided to pour them one on top of the other into the centre, so the colours were defined. We also made our purple mixed colour really strong:

And put it into the oven...

After baking, upon taking out of the tray, part of the bottom got stuck to the tray and so removed part of the cake! But this was Ok, because the slight curvature of the cake was 'shaved' flat to make the building as flat as possible.

We baked a second cake while waiting for this one to cool.

The ceremonial cutting of the cakes:

We cut one cake down the middle of the length, and stacked it up:

The other was also cut down the length of the middle, but was used to create the third layer, and also laid vertically to create the side of the Bauhaus (on the right). The obtruding front part of the Bauhaus was cut out with a knife, any leftover parts being used to fill any gaps.

Then, we mixed some white icing and completely covered the cake in a thin layer, almost like plaster on a wall, trying to remove all the nooks and crannies which would make the finished piece look lumpy.

After several layers of this icing, we began to roll out some ready-roll white icing and cut it into appropriate sections, securing it onto the cake using mixed icing. Any further lumpy parts were made level by more icing being put under the roll out icing layer. We used black food colouring mixed with lots of water to create grey food 'paint' for the front section and roof of the Bauhaus:

We then painted some ready roll icing with this black food colouring, then cut it into strips and stuck onto the side of the Bauhaus using mixing icing:

The Bauhaus lettering was cut out monotonously using a scalpel and refrigerated for as long as possible to make them somewhat strong. We added a picture of Fred to one of the front windows.

Finally, we dusted some icing powder over the roof for snow (since it was Christmas!) and added a novelty Christmas tree.

The door was painted red with red food colouring.

The finished piece:

The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus Kuchen.

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OUGD404 - Design Principles : Manipulating Letterforms / Birth of a font

In preparation for the studio session we brought an example of 'ABC abc' in a roman, gothic, script and block font. We ( literally ) dissected the letterforms with a pair of scissors and experimented in creating new letterforms by rearranging the cross bars, stems etc. Here are the results:

Out of these 100's of examples, I have narrowed it down to my favourite 5:

I picked these 5 mainly because they vary in line thickness, which in my opinion creates interest. I will now design other letters based on these to create a preview of the alphabet.

1.

Using this letter as a starting point, I looked for sections of this that could be translated into other letterforms such as 'a':

Because I was using layout paper and a fine-liner, I was able to physically flip over the paper and try out the designs in reverse. This helped me solve the 'a' design. From this, I flipped the 'c' design back to front to create the bowl of the 'b':

I found the 'x', 'y' and 'z' the most difficult because they were not similar in shape to the first 3 letters apart from the 'y', but this was also difficult to achieve while avoiding trying to make it look like a 'g'.

I resolved the issue of the 'z' design by firstly creating an 's' design then flipping it using the transform tool and then creating box-ier edges.

To create the capital letters, I used the 'b' as a starting point, for the correct height. I found that flipping the 'b' upside down and back to front created an upper case 'P'. If I were then to add a curl to the bottom of this it could be a 'C'. Similarly if I were to join up the curl it would create a 'B' and so on.

I continued with this kind of development with all of the upper case letters until I reached the 'X', 'Y' and 'Z' because again, they are not similar in shape to the first 3 letters. I found it difficult to make an 'X' design that was as slim as the other letterforms and so felt I had to leave it as 2 'C's in symmetry...

The 'Y' I developed as a larger version of the lower case letter and a similar resolution was created for the 'Z':

The final letterforms of 'Nouvague' A loose take on an Art Nouveau font.

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2.

Again, from the 'b' I can create the 'c' and 'a' because they are of similar, curvy shape. 

I used the bowl of the 'b' to create the a by flipping it vertically. From that again, I could then use the bowl of the 'a' to create the bowl of the 'c'. I added the loops to unify the design:

From the 'b' design, I could develop the 'y' by turning it upside down and opening the bowl:

By using the bowl 

from the 'a' and 'c' I could develop half of the 'x'. For the other half I decided to create a loop like the other designs. 

However, the 'z' was slightly harder to develop because it's such an angular letterform. 

After scanning in my hand rendered 'z', I decided to re-design it to recreate it to make it look more like the other designs by using traces of the bowl from the 'c' and keeping it the same width as the other letters. Like the first design, I incorporated the loop as a crossbar:

I scanned in the 'b' and worked in the same way I did when hand rendering, by copying segments of one design onto another:

The finished lower case letters:

To create the upper case letters, I started with the cap-height of the 'b'. For the upper case 'B' I simply added the top bowl to the original 'b' to ensure unification. From that, I created the upper case 'A' by using the outside curves of the 'B' and a simple loop design for the cross bar. The upper case 'Y' was developed from the bowl of the lower case 'y', used twice with the loop design from the 'c'. Again, the hardest thing I found to unify in style were the 'Z' & 'X' designs, which had to be drawn from scratch:

The finished designs:

The final letterforms for 'loops' font. Named this because of it's looped features.

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3.

I started by tracing this letterform and developing the other letters from what I could fit into the original sketch. For example, 'a' was developed from the 'b' turned upside down and the stem shortened. 

The other letters were developed in this way, all originating from the 'b':

The upper case 'C' and 'X' were developed straight onto the mac.

The final letterforms to 'Chester' font. Named this because of it's similar appearance to an old sign in Chester.

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4.

Using the bowl of the b to create all curves of the letters, I found that by this time, I was producing the letters a lot more quickly and all in one go with little to no problems to face. Even the hardest of letters such as 'z' and 'x' had become nothing more than routine!:

Then within twenty minutes was digitised using Adobe Illustrator:

The final letterforms of 'Cursive Doodle' font. Named this because of its formal-yet-informal appearance.

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5.

Unlike the other fonts I had created, I didn't trace any of the original letterform onto others, but decided to do it all freehand instead. This meant that the font overall looked less formal and less unified but was a much quicker process and I knew that it could be refined digitally.

The initial sketches:

I traced around with the pen tool, and this time I copied and pasted certain elements to make it look more uniformed. I decided to leave them unfilled, as I liked the effect it created and how it looked different from the other fonts I had created. 

The final letterforms to 'francais' font.

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