The current assignment in History & Theory of Graphic Design is this: Design a deck of playing cards, or a chess set, in the graphic design period of our choosing. Assuming I choose De Stijl as my period, these are elements of my design at the left. The card denominations will be rendered in this “font” made by creating a 5×9 black-block grid (+1 for the tail of the Q) and subtracting blocks from it for each character.
Following are the four suits:
1 – Van Doesburg
2 – Mondrian
3 – Van der Leck
4 – Huszar (not completed yet)
It’s a whole lotta square.
Edited to add: Looking at this post I realize I’m missing an A for Ace. It’s the zero in the Roman numerals of cards, I guess.
Here’s a bit of an antidote to all that square. A somewhat random image, I know, with stream-of-consciousness text, but randomness and stream-of-conscious are just what’s needed after a bout with De Stijl.
I broke out the pen and ink this morning. This nib was on its last legs but I only had three lines of sample lettering to send via email to a client, so I powered through.
Later I went back to the drawing table for the somewhat unfamiliar pleasure of lettering, and to convince myself to throw the nib away. I’m convinced.
ypography is interesting at the moment: we’re designing fonts. I wrote out an uncial font using a Zig scroll marker (first 4 letters shown above), scanned it in, and then vectorized the scan. The resulting paths are too complicated to go into Type Tool, and so I have traced each letter with the pen tool in Illustrator and then imported each into Type Tool. The initial letter of this paragraph has been traced in Illustrator. It’s tedious work, but somehow addicting.
