During the crit, people thought the sans-serif typeface was the best option because it's balanced and leaves more scope for alterations. The condensed concept was 'visually very strong', especially with the angled crossbar which reflects 'narrow' well. The main criticism was for the lack of examples for each concept. This made it hard for others to give me feedback as there wasn't much to critique. The reason for this was because I was still teaching myself digital techniques in order to smarten my initial sketches up. In some cases, the width of the characters wasn't completely consistent so I will need to make sure I am accurate.
Development
In order to become accurate with stroke, I used tracing paper which allowed me to accurately change elements such as the cross bar by hand and then scan it in to Illustrator to smarten it up:
The stroke is a lot more consistent through A and B, however the width isn't consistent enough for the C. I decided to bend the crossbar on the B diagonally down instead of up because the bottom bowl needed to be taller and the same angle as the upper bowl.
I thought about creating a diagonal line towards the top and bottom of the bowl but I thought the shape was very similar to the B which makes my concept transferrable. Tighter curves on the bowl were hard to trace but I made the stroke smaller so that it was consistent with the rest of the characters.
I thought a lot about how I could manipulate the E due to the fact that it's not a closed character. The arms and the ear can be manipulated in so many ways but I needed it to reflect my concept and be visually strong:
I felt the centre ear looked forced and imbalanced when angled up so I tried squashing the centre which was balanced and could be a recurring characteristic for unclosed characters. I only squashed the centre ear in order to keep it balanced. I experimented further by curving the top and bottom of the stem as I thought this would make the type flow better. I associated it with the shape of the B, however I felt like there was more I could do with the centre line.
Eventually, I decided to go with the above. By simply narrowing the lines and cutting down the centre ear made the character friendlier and confined.
'L' is another open character that I struggled to transfer my concept to. I previously created the character 'J' by condensing the descender and I thought I could mirror this character to make my alphabet transferable. The curved descender works for the 'J' because that is a normal characteristic, however using the same concept for the 'L' makes it look lower case.
To overcome this, I reverted back to the original typeface and went for a geometric approach because an L normally consists of a tall stem and a right angle, followed by a shorter terminal. I angled the terminal because I thought it would make my alphabet consistent with the rest of the typeface, however the angled line is too tall which reminds me of an upside down 1 and makes it harder to read:
Reverted back to the original character but narrowed the line and cut off the terminal at an angle :
I felt the terminal was too short and the cut off angle wasn't consistent with the rest of my characters. I resorted to sticking to the original typeface, narrowed the width of the line and gave it a beak. I like how geometric the shape is and I feel it resembles the 'squashed' concept with the beak which almost turns it into a serif typeface:
Example of how I manipulate the typeface using Illustrator:
Lowering opacity allows me to see my own line in comparison to the original. Traced accurately around the outside, however I made the bowl bigger so that the width of line was thinner and accentuated its height.
Manipulated the tail by angling it up instead of horizontally to confine the character.
Filled in the contours to make it bold and easier to read on a range of scales.
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