“A letter can be anything, anything can be a letter,” was a one week class in the Summer Design Intensive program at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco..
Its intention was to reconstruct the alphabet, as an investigation for a personal visual language. The graphic symbols of characters derive from objects or abstracts, which have a specific reference or value to carry information or to communicating ideas to others. The students collected objects, ideas or other things of personal importance or interest. They simplified them into a set of graphic symbols, and glyphs, pictographs or 'logos' from
| | photographs or scans and traced them in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator or Streamline. 26 designs to assign to the capitals, 26 to the lowercases, and 10 to the numerals. The designs then were imported into Fontographer, to create a working font of their character set. With their font the students produced pages for a collective font catalog to communicate the story, origin and philosophy behind their design. The last day, the students created a short animation ( ) with these character shapes, using Flash for authoring software.
Max Kisman, July 2003. |
