amyspengler-blog

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Type Specimen | Project #4 | Lora

Here is my submitted final for the Type Specimen project. 60 seconds plus 3 seconds black before and after. Music and other info in the Vimeo description.

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Type Specimen | Look and Feel | Lora

I decided to pick a few screen captures from my work on my type specimen to express the look and feel I gave to Lora. As I briefly mentioned in my concept page, I wanted to stick with the black and white feel since it is a calligraphic-based font but I’m also hoping the pink color gives it that push toward modern and artsy.

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Just a side note, may have found the reddit where I’ll be spending all my breaks. Reminds me of the conversation I had with my nine year old brother telling me comic sans isn’t even that bad of a font. 

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Type Specimen | Storyboard | Original

My first fleshed out storyboard for the Type Specimen project.

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Type Specimen | Concept | Brainstorm

Just some notes and doodle possibilities of supporting imagery. Since Lora is calligraphic inspired, I want this aspect to be a driving force for most of the video. Perhaps show it in an “evolution” type style (from paper to online since it can be used for both print and screen). I think doing something with the ink would be very interesting and fit appropriately for an artsy type.

Artsy and classy. Modern. Contemporary. 

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Type Specimen | Research | Compilation Post

.:Research:.

Lora:

Lora is a well-balanced contemporary serif with roots in calligraphy. It is a text typeface with moderate contrast well suited for body text.

A paragraph set in Lora will make a memorable appearance because of its brushed curves in contrast with driving serifs. The overall typographic voice of Lora perfectly conveys the mood of a modern-day story, or an art essay.

Technically Lora is optimized for screen appearance, and works equally well in print. Designed by Olga Karpushina in 2011. Cyrillic extension designed by Alexei Vanyashin in May, 2013.

Lora is a versatile text family of four styles: Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic. Its typographic voice is calligraphy inspired.

About Calligraphy:

Modern calligraphy ranges from functional hand-lettered inscriptions and designs to fine-art pieces where the abstract expression of the handwritten mark may or may not compromise the legibility of the letters. Classical calligraphy differs from typography and non-classical hand-lettering, though a calligrapher may create all of these; characters are historically disciplined yet fluid and spontaneous, at the moment of writing.

Calligraphy continues to flourish in the forms of wedding and event invitations, font design, typography original hand-lettered logo design, religious art, announcements, graphic design, calligraphic art, cut stone inscriptions and memorial documents. It is also used for props and moving images for film and television, testimonials, birth and death certificates, maps, and other works involving writing.

Olga Karpushina:

Olga Karpushina was born in Moscow in 1987. She studied design in the Moscow state pedagogical university and the British higher school of art and design. Currently she is focused on human centered design and is working on product, service, strategy, and business model design projects.

Olga’s LinkedIn Bio:

I’m a design researcher. I’m keen on product, service, strategy and business model design. — I worked for the top design research and service design companies in Russia (Lumiknows, Experience Lab, Signbox); — designed a service and a customer experience strategy for the innovative museum space “Open museum”; — designed a service and a customer experience strategy for the shopping mall SportEx; — took part as an art director in creating of the toolkit on design thinking methodology for Sberbank (a largest bank in Russia); — took part in doing the design research for the deaf blind support fund So-edineniye; — took part in doing the design research and creating the design brief for a financial company; — studied trends for Philips and Sberbank; — took part as a designer and a lecturer in organization of design thinking courses and strategy sessions; — designed more than 25 corporate identity projects; — also designed Lora typeface for Google Fonts.

Cyrillic Script:

The Cyrillic script is named after Saint Cyril, a missionary from Byzantium who, along with his brother, Saint Methodius, created the Glagolitic script. Modern Cyrillic alphabets developed from the Early Cyrillic script, which was developed during the 9th century in the First Bulgarian Empire (AD 681-1018) by a decree of Boris I of Bulgaria (Борис I). It is thought that St. Kliment of Ohrid, a disciple of Cyril and Methodius, was responsible for the script. The Early Cyrillic script was based on the Greek uncial script with ligatures and extra letters from the Glagolitic and Old Church Slavonic scripts for sounds not used in Greek.

Capital and lowercase letters were not distinguished in old manuscripts

Yeri (Ы) was originally a ligature of Yer and I (Ъ + I = Ы).

Iotation was indicated by ligatures formed with the letter I: Ꙗ (not ancestor of modern Ya, Я, which is derived from Ѧ), Ѥ, Ю (ligature of I and ОУ), Ѩ, Ѭ.

Many letters had variant forms and commonly used ligatures, for example И = І = Ї, Ѡ = Ѻ, ѠТ = Ѿ.

The Cyrillic alphabet has been adapted to write more than 50 different languages, mainly in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. In many cases additional letters are used, some of which are adaptations of standard Cyrillic letters, while others are taken from the Greek or Latin alphabets.

Alexei Vanyashin:

Alexei Vanyashin is a typeface designer, educator, and researcher, based in Geneva, Switzerland. His design and research interests include:

- Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek Typeface Design; - Readability and Legibility issues; - History of Cyrillic Typography; - Detailed and Structured Typography; - Web Typography.

Links:

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lora

http://www.identifont.com/show?2VTL

https://www.linkedin.com/in/okarpush/?trk=public-profile-join-page

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/cyrillic.htm

http://www.110design.ru/

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Type Specimen | Observational Study | Research

This is was mainly started to be only an observational study but grew to include information about the typeface Lora. You can see here I experimented with:

- weight and styles (whopping 4 types);

- various sizes;

-  tracking, leading and alignment.

I will probably create a text post compilation of all/any information and research I can find on Lora and it’s creator(s).

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Type Specimen | Inspirational Post | Barbour - Animated Typeface

I don’t know if it’s just the type or the way it was shot (distance of the items with type appearing), but I wish it was more legible. However, I like the music and the use of these 3-D -esque props. It’s a very classy feel. Gets a little repetitive and predictable, don’t know about some of the phrases.. However, I enjoy these muted colors and they fit well with the music.

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Type Specimen | Inspirational Post | Harir, A Modern Arabic Typeface

While I don’t necessarily see myself seeing a voiceover, the animating style works very well with this style of animation. The accent of the orange color is very pleasant. I also appreciate the idea of type for other languages. The transitions are good, too.

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Type Specimen | Inspirational Post | Didot: A Type Specimen Book

I chose this book as part of my inspiration because I really enjoy how sleek and simple each page is. Other than black and white, it is accented with a muted purple and the designer uses what one could argue as different opacities of colors to create texture. Organized and aesthetically pleasing.

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Type Specimen | Inspirational Post | DIN Type Specimen Animation

This is the one we looked at in my group for class. My favorite part is by far the transitions between the infographics. They were never overly jarring or new and the changes fit very well with the theme and history behind DIN. I also think the simple vector shapes and graphics were very successful, as well as the use of the two main colors (yellow and black). The gray doesn’t fit as well toward the end but my guess was it was used to emphasize and match industrial colors.

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The font I’m interested in currently is Lora, but I have not done much research yet so we’ll see how it goes!

An excerpt from this site:

Lora is a well-balanced contemporary serif with roots in calligraphy. It is a text typeface with moderate contrast well suited for body text.

A paragraph set in Lora will make a memorable appearance because of its brushed curves in contrast with driving serifs. The overall typographic voice of Lora perfectly conveys the mood of a modern-day story, or an art essay.

Technically Lora is optimized for screen appearance, and works equally well in print.

Just from key features in these paragraphs, I would want to play up the calligraphy aspect, curves, artistic aspect, and the screen/print dynamic.

History Links:

Lora: http://www.cyreal.org/2012/07/lora/

Pairings: https://www.typewolf.com/site-of-the-day/fonts/lora

Olga Karpushina: http://www.identifont.com/show?2VTL

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8jZL8WqQV8)

Title Sequence | Project #3 | The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Vimeo decided I reached my “weekly upload” limit with this video so I turned to Youtube. Hard to say since the Stop Motion project was such a labor of love and I really enjoyed that experience, but for a solo project, this is by far my favorite.

The most time consuming thing about this project was definitely creating all the illustrations and layers, but putting it together in after effects flew nicely. 

More info about mediums, music, assets, and synopsis in the Youtube description.

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Title Sequence | Asset Creation | Illustrations

Here are all the illustrations I created for my Title Sequence. They are put behind temporary, colored backgrounds which I don’t use in the actual title sequence (but they’re similar). I didn’t want to have the illustrations bare. During the process, it felt like I made so many drawings, but uploading it now, it feels like I barely made any! That’s probably because of the layering process (which you’ll see in the final video).

I wanted to use Christopher’s "quirks” from the book and the color association in those to give connotations and themes to my drawings. (Example: Three red cars in a row = a good day, five in a row = a super good day vs. three yellow cars in a row = black day and detesting colors brown and yellow - refusing to eat any yellow-colored food). While the “murder of the dog” illustration is not necessarily positive, I felt it made more sense to be red since the actual cover of the book is red and proves to be a strong theme in the story (strong theme for a main title, win win).

All illustrations are made by me using the program FireAlpaca (free alternative to PaintTool Sai and shares some similarities to Photoshop drawing-wise).

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Random Unicode Letter Reveal Tutorials

Simple Random Letter/Symbol Reveal Tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNSwUC-iDM4

Slightly Complex(ish) Random Number Reveal Tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WZy_O_kJ_Y

I might try to play with the latter one depending on time. The first tutorial is simple but doesn’t really contain numbers. I’d like more of a number effect but I’d want it to be a mix of numbers and letters. This tutorial just has a few extra step to achieve that.

Edit: I attempted to use the second tutorial for the credit/title reveals but I realized it wouldn’t create the same effect. I like how the symbol one added the symbols and changed randomly until it transformed into the proper text. With the second tutorial you have to have the numbers already written to be the exact amount of characters as the title you are revealing and then those change into the right letters. 

It could work but I don’t think it would give the same feeling. I’ll have to look in the future on how to create an effect like the first tutorial only using numbers and letters. 

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Title Sequence | Process and Notes | Organization

This is a quick example within my notebook to show my planning before creation. I knew I had certain parts of credits and names I needed to include and visuals I wanted to incorporate so this will make the creation process of assets flow much easier. I arranged them in a way which is mostly chronological to the events in the book but also abstract enough without really giving anything away.

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Title Sequence | Original and Revised Storyboard | Layout

Included in the original storyboard is how I would use the visuals in general while the revised storyboard places them in an order and layout with the credits. I had many thoughts in my head as I’ve been rereading the book and knew I wanted a strong visual language so this is just the basic layout plan before I get everything out. I wanted to draw out a storyboard using simultaneity but seeing where we are at in the project and timeline, it doesn’t seem too practical. I’m focusing in on this one but keeping an open mind during the iterative process.