Project 1 - Letter Forms

This project really was a challenge for me; I'm not very good at using text, though it does truly interest me. As far as what I did for my process, it was fairly simple- using the Dafont resource that was given to us, I found a font that I deemed acceptable (called Lazy Sans) and downloaded it to my personal computer for use. I wanted it to be a thick, bold font as to convey a space where the eyes would be on a face. I liked the lines that it had around the edges of the font, it looked like worry lines or wrinkles to me- adding another small touch of a human characteristic- I tried to continue this small detail in the other parts of the piece. I used the stroke, curve, and direct selection tool for the lines that convey the frown and eyebrows. For the tear drops I used the pen tool (making sure all connections were set to "smooth") and used the direct selection tool to fit the anchor points how I wanted them.

The entire idea was to create the illusion of the expression that the word usually conveys. When someone is sad you'd usually think of a frowny face and some tears if someone’s really feeling the sadness. Using that idea I tried to create a frown with the curve tool, and some sad eyebrows, as well as some tear drops to show a sad face. In place of where the eyes would be I used the word itself as a place holder. It's like a giant emoticon.

I had a bit more fun with this one simply because of how ridiculous it was. The tools I used in this were the text tool, "place", transform, copy, paste, reflect, stroke, and fill. I also created my own custom gradient for the background to try and make it as awful looking as possible and possibly clash with the images and font I placed on top of it. For the font I used Comic Sans, and searched the Internet for the images placed on top. It was a lot of moving stuff around, scaling objects to fit on the art board how I saw fit and quite frankly trying to make it look as ugly as possible.

And truly that was the concept- I am a huge fan of design and while I might not be at the level of creating great design myself- that's the goal in the end. To create something that was the opposite of me I wanted to create the idea of just AWFUL design- using my personal least favorite font, the equivalent of clip art for the Internet Explorer icon, and the worst color combos I could think of I tried to make it as unappealing as possible. I placed all the objects at angels and scattered them across the page to try and rid any sense of balance or symmetry. I used words like "swag" and "yolo" as well as Justin Bieber and IE because I can't stand them- they're about as far from my interests or likes as possible and hopefully will bring about the "antonyms" asked for in the assignment.

- Kasandra Pittmann