OUGD403 - Alphabet Soup: Research

Today we were asked to get our work out from our Summer brief which consisted of 30 pieces of research of each letterform of the alphabet. We had to make sure all of our letters were cut out so that we could arrange them into ten categories. These ten categories were chosen by reflecting on our notes made during the previous exercise (when we shared our artists' work).

Our categories were:

• Serif
• Sans-serif
• Objects in the form of letters
• Uppercase
• Lowercase
• Hand rendered
• Digital
• Italic
• Bold
• Calligraphy

Below are the images from this exercise:

For our first brief we have been asked to design ten letterforms to portray the word we chose out of the randomiser. My word is 'pop', I have started to carry out some research to get started with my work. 

To get started I decided to look up the word 'pop' on the internet.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pop?s=t

I have brainstormed lots of different ideas relating to the word.

• Pop art
• Pop music
• Bubble wrap
• Bubbles
• Balloon
• Chewing gum
• Cork pop
• Popcorn
• Fizzy pop

I feel that by having lots of visual aids to work from helps me a great deal with creating my own work and it also sparks off new ideas.

http://contrarianedge.com/wp-content/uploads/original.jpg

I particularly like Roy Lichtenstein's pop art. I feel as though I could successfully create a set of ten letterforms in a very similar style by simply creating each letter out of individual dots and then possibly changing the opacity of each dot to represent the word 'pop'. I could do this by making the more central dots bolder and larger and then gradually making them smaller towards the outside, lowering the opacity. If I wanted to make it even more intricate I could create breaks in the dots to resemble each one 'popping'.

http://soooome.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/buch_popart.gif

I also particularly like this image and the use of geometric shapes. However I am not too sure whether it represents the word as obviously as it could do. Therefore I would probably have to take inspiration and have a think about how I could make it suitable.

http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/5aa/5aa351.htm

I found this which I think is quite quirky and clever, combining the idea of typography with image.



http://www.glasgowuniversitymagazine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/pop-plus.jpg

This illustrates my initial thought of using bubble wrap to create my type designs.

http://pinterest.com/pin/14496030020757149/

I had a search online for black and white pop illustrations and this was one of the images. I am not sure whether I would use anything relating directly to popcorn as it is a bit obvious but I like the style of this illustration.

http://images.colourbox.com/thumb_COLOURBOX4357935.jpg

When I imagine an object popping I imagine some sort of explosion or burst of energy. I searched 'balloon burst' and found some of the images very inspiring.



 http://visitskc.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/ba.jpg

  

Since coming across these images of the balloons it has given me much more inspiration and I feel as though I have more ideas coming together. I am starting to imagine creating a collection of pop art letterforms by combining the dots with the idea of an explosion. This could be illustrated by me removing parts of the dots to portray the idea that each one is popping and exploding.

http://www.xerxy.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/balloon_burst.jpg

I did a search for the word pop and this was the first website at the top of my search. It seems that any of the text I have found is quite bubble like so I would probably take inspiration from this and develop my own letters along the same lines as this.

http://www.popfun.co.uk/