Kathryn Hockey OCA Learning Log: Exercise: Text and Image

Having experimented with writing the words in the exercise freehand,

I made a crib sheet in photoshop, roughly dividing the fonts by styles. I’ve printed it out and can refer to it easily rather than scrolling through the font list where the samples are often too small to see clearly.

The fonts I chose for each word:

Big: Rockwell extra bold, serif, distorted to appear taller

Small: Tekton Pro sans serif, lower case

Fat: Blackoak Std bulgingly distorted in a fat, fleshy tone is my favourite as it is so chunky, stencil std also works well

Thin: Eras Light ITC I adjusted the kerning to make letters closer and used free transform to make it taller and thinner

Fast: Freestyle Script with an upward slant to represent speed

Slow: Edwardian Script, to depict elaborate care in the rendering of the word

Fun: loopy Giddyup and circus-y rosewood curved and coloured brightly

Boring: Myriad Pro, sans serif in black

Mad: Jokerman, Curlz MT, upper/lower case and different font sizes within the word, twisted in free transform and coloured brightly

Calm: smooth, even Brush script Std in a gentle colour

I then traced the printed words and coloured them using various materials:

Those which I think worked best, tweaked a bit in photoshop:

Watercolour paint and a chalk background

Water-based crayons

Italic dip pen and ink

Indian ink, fine nib dip pen, crackle glaze and stain

Gold pen on black paper

I have also collected a few interesting fonts from:

TV Programme credits

‘Wodehouse in Exile’

· set in 1940s

· like an old fashioned type writer

· Miriam Fixed (for some reason I can’t access the actual font in word)

· Simplified Arabic Fixed (for some reason I can’t access the actual font in word)

‘The Lady Vanishes’

· TV version 2013

· Set in 1930s

· fine, elegant, sans serif, all higher case

· MS GOTHIC

· Eccentric Standard

Local restaurants

Las Delicias elegant art nouveau style font, nice kerning

Las Delicias poster

Quatro Gatos nice mix of fonts on this website, I like the g in gatos

The Basque Country

I’d never seen this traditional Basque font or Euskara typeface before my recent visit. It is characterised by thick serifs and derives from stone and wood carving styles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language

I love the way that Andrea Joseph includes many different styles of hand rendered text with her drawings, distorting them beautifully at times

I find the title from this ad for the film Populaire very appealing, unusual and evocative in its form and colour with that dinky little illustration in the O.

Pop-art inspired salad cream ad very eye-catching for its mix of text and image despite its relatively subtle colouring.

This illustration which I found on the BBC Radio 4 website (with no credit of the artist) is delightful in its incorporation of text (albeit abstract) and image.

I love the complexity and depth of this illustration by Kristjana S Williams for Triumph lingerie, her delicate mix of text, collaged drawings and digital work is really inspiring.

You can see a short interview with her discussing the project here.

I find the artwork of my dear friend Arti Kraaijeveld enchanting and other worldly. His combination of found objects with drawings, paintings and text and unusual use of different materials has a timeless and ethereal quality. The repetition of symbols is particularly potent, here are some examples.

Other signs, posters and flyers with interesting use of text and image