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SPACE MONO - type specimen

My type specimen is done!!! I’ve had SO much computer drama all night/morning and dealing with so many multiple crashes i wanted to cry but it’s finally up!!! 

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alternate song options

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNx9mkAiAYM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9Woc1NRwAg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPE7H7RVXeM !!!

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Super super rough story board sketches that's more for just me to understand 🙃

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STORYBOARD OUTLINE

My storyboard captions/outline as I’m working on it. It changes as I work through the project. Especially the specific wording.

LOOK AND FEEL - atomic age/mid century modern/a little groovy but minimal. Music: jazzy 

- Elevator to Freedom(ID 452) - Lobo Loco

- OR if I manage to get my hands on anything that I can actually use that sounds like this : Gay Spirits - David Rose & His Orchestra or like Moon Moods - Les Baxter & His Orchestra 

Graphic Elements: (1) 50s graphic pattern of diamonds (3) magazine page / poster, very minimal 

OUTLINE

1) title

MONO SPACE //  SPACE MONO

MOVEMENT: letters appear with diamond pattern, and rearrange from ‘mono space’ to ‘space mono’

2) creator/designer & when

 “Created by Colophon Foundry for Google Fonts in 2016”

MOVEMENT: diamonds shrink into letters, ‘space mono’ slides up and under it, caption appears and holds for a couple beats, then the whole screen slides up

Original text:

Colophon Foundry- London and LA based digitally type foundry est in 2009 - commissioned work in type design is complemented by independent and interdependent ini titivates in editorial design, publication, curation, and pedagogy

3) history/context/defining characteristics

“developed for editorial use in headline & display typography”

 MOVEMENT: as last caption slides up, magazine spread climbs up and words appear one by one along headline- first ‘developed for editorial use’ and then ‘headline and display typography’

“The letterforms infuse a geometric foundation & grotesque details”

“These qualities are often found headline typefaces of the 1960s, especially in science fiction films, television, and literature.”

 MOVEMENT: camera shifts to edge of “paper” line,  cream bg overtakes screen and words shift to left side. First: the letterforms infuse a geometric foundation/grotesque details (descriptives switch out) Second: These qualities are often found i....

“inspired by the character Rick Deckard in Blade Runner, connecting the genres of Film Noir and Sci-Fi”

MOVEMENT: incorporate hands on type as the words appear letter by letter

“Space Mono is a typeface drawn to be innately fixed-pitch that comprises Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic cuts”

MOVEMENT: flick through reg, italic, bold and bold italic weights

Its construction often dictates form (an ‘m’ may get smushed into its container; an ‘i’ extends outwards with foot and bar)

MOVEMENT: illustratte M getting smushed and I extending

The lower case ‘g’ - starting from a geometric, affable upper-half, the descending foot of the letterform is drawn to create a strong juxtaposition with its above-baseline counterpart. 

This gesture opened up the typeface’s voice by embracing its awkwardness.

MOVEMENT: zoom in on the G and highlight the different portions of the letter to go with the text as it appears alongside it

The perfectly vertical section in each letterform, quite present in the uppercase and running just a few units in the lower; stylized ink traps that simultaneously harken to very analog print methods and very digital clock readouts; the 90-degree ‘bent-pipe’ behavior initially encountered in Novarese’s designs; an overall texture that is neither beholden to typographic convention or entirely outside of its traditions.

MOVEMENT: TBD 

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testing out a style frame to test out the font + color scheme 

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LOOK & FEEL for Space Mono

(going for a minimal but atomic age inspired theme)

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OBSERVATIONAL STUDY

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SPACE MONO // weights 

(working on observational study now)

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RESEARCH: SPACE MONO

1) Space Mono is an original fixed-width type family designed by Colophon Foundry for Google Design. It supports a Latin Extended glyph set, enabling typesetting for English and other Western European languages.Developed for editorial use in headline and display typography, the letterforms infuse a geometric foundation and grotesque details with qualities often found in headline typefaces of the 1960s (See: Microgramma, Eurostile), many of which have since been co-opted by science fiction films, television, and literature.Typographic features include old-style figures, superscript and subscript numerals, fractions, center-height and cap-height currency symbols, directional arrows, and multiple stylistic alternates. (source)

2.) Space Mono — whose name inverts its own typographic classification — is precisely that, a typeface drawn to be innately fixed-pitch that comprises Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic cuts, commissioned for the 2016 update of Google Fonts. This monospace-first, monospace-only brood was hatched in the summer of 2015, on the heels of a sans-serif family called Basis, which we created at Colophon Foundry UK — again, an instance of a proportional-first, monospace-after progression. Included in Basis’s 16-cut system was the most extensive monospaced component we’d drawn to date: a Regular, its Italic counterpart, and Bold and Bold Italic pairings.

The monospaced cuts reacted to Basis’s grotesque forms in such a way that they still garnered a grotesque classification. A monospace type, however, doesn’t describe its character or distinctions, but rather its function and construction. And while that construction often dictates form (an ‘m’ may get smushed into its container; an ‘i’ extended outwards with foot and bar), we find it interesting that despite these formal constraints, monospaced type is widely used in editorial settings to give a certain style or feel rather than hit a specific character count or meet a technical limitation. (source)

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INSPIRATION:

DIDIER STABLE - (thoughts) Okay so I couldn’t find any info on this, and I don’t speak french so I’m sure the above caption is plenty informative but I’m really feeling the chartreuse/mustard color on the black and playing around with this for print by switching around which elements are treated with which colors

Didier Stable • Spécimen, 03.—11.2015 48 pages, 180 × 250 mm.

Travail mené sous la direction de Michel Derre & Franck Jalleau. Analyse du personnage et écriture sous l’égide d’Erell Guillemer et Léa Walter.

Extrait :

[…] Didier est logiquement devenu le nom du caractère. Stable, celui de la fonte. Plutôt que regular ou bold, stable me permettait de définir une attitude tirée de celle du personnage. Comme point de départ, j’avais extrait des traits physiques remarquables et qui semblaient moteur dans le dessin d’un caractère. Au final, le gabarit de la lettre est généreux. La chasse est large, et c’est ce qui assoit la lettre, ni vraiment ronde ni vraiment carrée comme la corpulence de Didier. Son front épais, qui pèse sur ses yeux, m’a inspiré le traitement inversé des graisses : cela à pour effet d’alourdir la partie supérieure de la lettre qui vient donc peser sur sa contreforme, aussi appelée œil. Enfin, cette typographie n’est pas très élancée, les ascendantes et descendantes sont relativement courtes, et rien n’est droit ni lisse : la lettre est musclée, incarnée, robuste. Les terminaisons sont verticales et tranchantes comme la franchise du personnage. Des empattements rectangulaires et épais viennent parfois stabiliser les glyphes et donnent à la fonte un aspect de monochasse. Le monochasse est têtu dans sa façon d’uniformiser l’encombrement des lettres. Mais dans cette fonte, ce n’est qu’une apparence. Didier n’est peut-être pas si buté et rigide qu’on pourrait le croire…

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INSPIRATION:

“The Univers® typeface family is one of the most prolific grotesque sans-serif typefaces of the century. Like Helvetica®, Univers is based on 1898‘s Akzidenz-Grotesk. However, Univers is unique in that the design lacks superfluous features of any type, creating a design that is versatile and distinctive without being obstrusive. Adrian Frutiger began work on Univers in 1954, completing his design in 1957. The Univers type family has grown to 44 different weights and styles, some of which include Cyrillic characters.” (source)

THOUGHTS: I’m pretty sure that almost every relevant video that came up on youtube on the search “type specimen” were from previous students of DSGN 260. I’m not sure if this was one of them, but I really enjoyed the sort of -space- and scientific theme played throughout that supported the look and feel of the typeface. Since the typeface that I picked for this project is “Space Mono”, looking at similar fonts help give me some ideas.

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INSPIRATION: 

“Institut is an industrial-strength display face, with a no-nonsense feel of a research lab and audacity of a space mission control. Based on assertive geometric forms, it is suitable for a variety of on-screen and print uses. Designed by Vyacheslav Kirilenko with participation of Gayaneh Bagdasaryan in 2013.” (source)

THOUGHTS: This typeface is so modern, bold and clean. The way it’s presented in this form, layered over and next to photos that help elicit the -space age- feel really encapsulate the mood of the typeface and what it can be used for.

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I’m reblogging this again because I’ve uploaded a second version of my video based on the feedback I got from Tuesday’s critique. It’s still connected to the same URL. So to see the changes you can watch the same link above.  ^

But I’ve listed the changes I made to the video yesterday here since the old version of the video is no longer up for comparison:

- fixed a typo 

- added a smoke effect behind the actors’ names in the fortune teller scene to make them more legible. I found these one’s were hardest to see compared to the rest. I tried playing with different typefaces to see if that would help with the overall legibility  but I’m attached to the overall look and feel that OCR-A STD font brings to the video and the animation. Plus I feel like the rest are readable- it’s mainly due to the high contrast BG of the area in between the two fortune tellers that the names were harder to see. So hopefully adding the smoke screen layer on top helps with that.

-shortened the carousel scene some more (which involved speeding up the horses’ movements)

- took out the last curtain falling scene (after the carousel), and re-edited the clip of the performers shooting out of the canon in reverse. In premiere, I added a mirror effect to it, and then layered a section from a video of sparklers going off over it and played with the blending options until I found one I liked. I decided to use this segment to add the “based on the novel by” caption over it. Which I’m not sure if this was successful, or if I should have just taken out the caption entirely but oh well.

I’m finally done! This took SO long to upload for such a short video, but I know it’s because I had so many different comps going on one sequence. I noticed one annoying typo so I’ll fix it and re-upload it asap.

3 MEDIUMS: photographs, illustrations and video! 

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I’m finally done! This took SO long to upload for such a short video, but I know it’s because I had so many different comps going on one sequence. I noticed one annoying typo so I’ll fix it and re-upload it asap.

3 MEDIUMS: photographs, illustrations and video! 

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more assets (found in class)

paper cut animation tutorial 

paper animation example video

last shot bg (night sky)

merry go round image

inner tents image

reference photo (cannot use) (for style)

another merry go around

another reference photo (esp juggler) 

CU of merry go round horse

video: 

train passing, circus day

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Not super sold on the color scheme yet but here’s the general idea! 

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STORYBOARD (super rough, I'll make more as I work through this idea + have more concrete images in my head to work with. Might have to get my hands on the book again, haven't read this in a year) Also I just remembered that the core of the story is that it's two magicians/performers are pitted against each other in Les Cirque de Reves (the circus of dreams) and each night, at midnight they take turns creating truly magical illusions that wow the unwitting circus goers. So I could play with that, highlighting certain aspects of these feats they do, possibly using their silhouettes in the BG, IDK. (I.e. Making the horses come alive on the merry go round, creating a magical indoor white garden thing?)