MODULAR TYPE RESEARCH

Modular design: 

-Reusable modules

-A design approach that subdivides a system into smaller parts called modules or skids

-simple collection of elements such as circles, squares, and triangles which can be combined to create a passable alphabet.

Advantages:

-Less in cost because of the reduced use of specific parts

-More flexible as elements of each letter can be used to form another one

-Standardized, system-like

-Less effort to maintain

Partners Tsukada Hidechika and Tsukada Tetsuya operate a hybrid typographic design practice and product design studio devoted to typographically-themed toys. Their “Toypography” project is a system of colorful, modular curved, and straight shapes for creating Latin and Japanese characters. Their playful take on connotative bilingual lettering treatments for corporate and commercial clients is both evocative and masterful, despite veering wildly from style to style.

I like how the typeface can be rearranged into different languages. As seen in the photo, the word BIRD can actually be broken down and recreated into a Chinese word of “bird”. Not only the Chinese form, its flexibility allows it to also be reformed into a physical form of a bird. What the designer did was just breaking down the word BIRD into small parts and rearrange them. This is very interesting to me as I tend to create things that are complicated, but what I really want is something really simple but at the same time can express what I wanted to express. I believe this is exactly what graphic designers are aiming for. Graphic designers have to use the simplest method to translate things.

During his studies at Norwich University College of the Arts, James Ward (High Wycombe, UK) created The London Underground Modular Typeface(2012).

As what is seen, he used different stops and stations from the underground to create letters. He didn’t really create letters from the stations, instead, he make used of the original underground map and discovered that there are actually a whole set of alphabets embedded in the map. This is very impressive as it shows that James is an observant person who will look around and observe things that are around him. We are all living in the same area, however, we didn’t not realised what James has realised. We look at the tube map every day, we use it every day, but why can’t we discover what James has discovered? Are we to absent minded? Or are we just too getting used of what we do every day and start to get numbed and not caring about thing that are surrounding us every day? I think that what we should do in order to make ourselves more “creative” and come up with more ideas is to observe your surroundings every day and look at to the things that we don’t really pay attention to in our daily lives. 

CYLINDER TYPEFACE RESEARCH:

Instagram: @angelamiuz 

Angela is a graphic design student who is based in Hong Kong. I really admire her as the style of her designs is what I want to achieve. She always uses bright colours and solid lines in her designs. Like the one that is shown, Angela created a boxy typeface by using small boxes. I like how the font is rerflected by the other perpendicular side of the box. It created a shadowing effect that looks symmetrical with the letter its own, but reflected. In order to make the typeface more easy and comfortable to look at, Angela used white to fill the letters. This makes the letters to be more readable and stand out more. However, there is actually some flaws in her design. I realised that the N and the H look the same. This shows that it is actually challenging to create all the letters A-Z by using one system as there are letters look alike like N and H, D and O. The system that Angela created is not applicable to all letters to make each letters unique and different. 

found this font from the internet. It is made up of three face of a cube. Maybe I can make a 4-faced one?

 ANGULAR TYPEFACE RESEARCH:

Found this interesting font from pinterest which quite similar the angular typeface that I did. They have similar system that this font is made of only triangles, squares, rectangles, rhombuses, trapeziums and sections of circles. The concept behind is quite similar to my typeface as mine is also made of a few shapes. I really like how the design made use of negative space. Take the O as an example, he could have just used 4 triangles for it, however, he added a square in the middle to fill in the negative space. This makes the typeface more readable and unique. He made use of different sizes of each shapes to make each letter different from each other. Like the N and S, he used smaller triangles and rhombus for the S and larger ones for the N. I understand how he wanted each of the letters to be unique, however, somehow some of them look alike. This shows that using only a few shapes to create a typeface is difficult as you only have a few options to choose from and to arrange them together to form A-Z.