Kintsugi is the Japanese art of putting broken pottery back together by sealing the cracks with gold - built on the idea that embracing flaws and imperfections, you can create an even stronger, more beautiful piece of art, this is idea is also a metaphor for self growth 'rebirth'. The typeface is designed to replicate the cracks in kintsugi ceramics. I wanted to create a bold font to suggest strength and how imperfections and flaws can make people stronger and even the strongest of people go through hardship.
Working under the theme of 'Rebirth', I have focused my first font on the idea of post-war architecture, or otherwise commonly known as modernist/brutalist architecture. Buildings constructed following the Second World War were built using new technologies of construction. These types of designs were known for their use of modern materials such as concrete and steel as well as their interesting geometrical forms. I was heavily influenced by the architecture featured in Owen Hopkins' book 'Lost Futures' which looks at the disappearing architecture of post-war Britain and how changing external contexts played a role in the subsequent destruction of these buildings.
This san serif font is inspired by the concept of ‘Community’. I explored the idea of unhealthy, anti-communities and real life examples of them, which lead me to Hollywood. Hollywood, beneath all the glamour, proves to often be a toxic community, considering the examples of misogyny, racism and sexual abuse that has taken place within the community. I wanted to recreate the iconic Hollywood sign and modify it to have cracks appearing, representing the real-life cracks appearing in Hollywood’s community. These cracks will represent examples such as Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement.
Inspired by fountain-based architecture, I've created my first fontstruction for the start of my UWE Graphic Design course. For this, I poured water onto different surfaces/objects with varying shapes to capture the cascading effect as reference images. Originally, I was first inspired by watercolour strokes to make a gradient effect, which developed into the idea of water fountains used in contemporary architecture.
This font explores the theme of anger. I took inspiration from heavy metal/rock album covers and tried to recreate the same irregular/jarring lettering they do. To do this I painted letters quickly on varying sizes of paper and translated this onto fontstruct to get a rough/rushed look.
My first typeface was inspired by the theme “gang community”. A large element of my research was the analysis of the most commonly forged bank notes. This typeface is the development of the contrasting typography that feature on notes. One type of typography is clear and concise, and the opposite typography is increasingly complex and hard to read to the naked eye. This is to make it extremely hard for criminals to counterfeit.