Burnout - Typeface design

Once the development of the concept had began to fully take shape and the sourcing of images for the zine was in the background, it was time to sort out the typeface that would become the visual association to the campaign about technology reliance in order to be productive an enhance life - but equally causing a burnout amongst the millennial generation. 

I had started all of the developments for this project using a sans serif typeface called Open Sans which was shown to be the most commonly used on the screens of devices. 

Monospaced font 
A monospaced font seemed appropriate to use as the display text because it was the font used in early computers - the start of the technological reliance of the millennial generation. 

Even though computers can now display a wide variety of fonts, the majority of IDEs and software text editors employ a monospaced font as the default typeface.



Design development 

The typeface design is a visual representation of these tabs being open with the aim to create an overwhelming feeling. The even spacing of the full letterforms still visually lacks a sense of uniformity and organisation as the filled parts of the letters become the focus and appear to be unevenly kerned. This essentially demonstrates the sporadic amounts of attention we are capable of as we attempt to switch between tasks and stimuli.

The development shows the initial experimentation where the repetition was less strategic and an even number was not used for each of the letters which work to represent the concept, but aesthetically this did not appear well designed and would not apply to any other outcomes very effectively. The typeface was more interesting we the different directions were introduced, communicating the idea of our mind and focus wandering in different directions when we are trying to add more stimuli than we can cognitively handle. 

As a colour experiment I took the idea of using RGB as a way to represent the digital interface that the campaign is focusing on. I didn't think aesthetically this was very striking though, so I decided not to continue with this development. 

Getting the typeface design to type 
I searched on the internet the best softwares to take the Adobe illustrator designed typeface and how to make it type like a functional font. The most commonly suggested software was 'Glyphs' which had a 30 day free trial, so I downloaded it and started to follow some tutorials which showed how to take a vector and import it into the software. 

I copy and pasted the vectors to each of the correct letters so that I could begin to develop the typeface. The importing of the design took away the fill of the front part of the letter ad converted it all to outlines which was not what I intended. As a test before i spent a long time doing all of the letters, I exported the typeface so far and added tit to Font Book which allowed me to test it out in Adobe Illustrator. The two letters that I had imported did work and when i typed them on Adobe Illustrator they came out as they looked on the glyphs programme. This means that if I can get the typeface to look correct on this programme, then it will work as a functional typeface. 

As I progressed with the project, I realised that as a display type it was not necessary to develop it to type because the use of rulers, guides and accurate spacing would allow for the title needed to be created.