Alphabet Soup. Crit

During the mid-project crit this morning I picked up a few ideas from other peoples work that I wish I had considered before starting my project. I say I wish because I feel that now, half way through the project, it is too late to reconsider a potential starting point.

The first of those things is chronology. Using some sort of timed order to develop the letters like an opening bud across the alphabet could've been workable. For example, the a would be really scrunched up and enclosed like a bud, and the z would be very open and extravagant like a flower.

Secondly, someone was given the word surface, and he looked into not only how surface meant something to put your TV on, but how it could be seen as the surface of the water, and how on the surface people can appear different to how they are. By doing this he'd placed his word in some sort of context and looked into it, rather than just looking at the word itself, which is what I did, and consequently his results were much more imaginative and varied than they probably would've been otherwise.

One girl was given the word interrupt, which is a very human thing. Typography and human behaviour are seemingly very difficult to link together, so she looked at action words that are associated with interruption and based her letter forms off the action words. Consequently she had a much broader range of manipulations than I had.

The main feedback I was given is that my idea to re-shape and re-size a letter to the golden ratio was quite a strong idea, and it was unanimous that I should work further on this idea. I was complimented on my research on the Fibonacci Sequence and the Golden Ratio and it was suggested that I use these two ideas to produce serifs for the futura font. It was also suggested that I look at the Fibonacci Sequence in art, but personally I can't see how this is going to help me given that art has no limitations whereas typography is a completely different field of design.

All in all todays crit was very reassuring that I did have a usable and strong idea because I was fairly worried up to the point of the crit that my current ideas were a bit unrefined. It has definitely pointed me in the direction I should continue in.