Alphabet Soup Final Crit and Explanation of Decisions

The main feedback given to me about my work was that I did well to avoid the obvious connotations of vernation and nature and to focus on bringing the connotations of the font (futura) and its historical and social context together. Futura was produced in post-WW1 Germany, when people were beginning to get back on their feet and business was picking up again. Futura was meant to reflect that positive atmosphere by using a clean and angular typeface, it looks "perfect", which is un-natural.

People were surprised how I'd managed to link the maths of the Fibonacci Sequence to something so natural as vernation and something so technical as futura at the same time, as well as being somewhat relieved that I'd stayed away from illustrative designs, which would be somewhat obvious and so less fun to analyse.

The first crit of the project to me confirmed to me that developing my letterforms using the Fibonacci Sequence was the way to go, so I took this advice as well as taking a couple of other ideas from my initial sheet of ten. The choice of letters was down to the initial sheet, the feedback was that the idea's exhibited on the letters G and T were the strongest, which I agreed with, but I wanted to continue working with the ideas in H, K and X. Out of the 5 letters, I decided that I'd use G, H and T as my examples as they're more commonly used than K and X. In most of my letters there was an element of re-scaling, as was the strongest theme from the initial crit, weather it be the letters dimensions or the different parts of the letters. In the H's and the Capital G's I combined this with the initial ideas from the H, K and X to create some variation, and in doing so, potentially creating further room for development.

Based on the feedback from the crit and my own personal preferences, I will probably not take any one design forward into the second brief. I will do some slight further experimentation but I know I want to cross over the 8:5 height:width idea and the 1:1.6 anatomical ratio because I think the more subtle changes will make for a more succesfful font, but the experimentation will mainly be with the rounding off of corners, as this will help distinguish my font from futura slightly.