Visual Language: Week 3

Week 3

Designing Expressive Words

I found that both exercises for the week really allowed me to look at my artist identity and what kinds of aesthetics fit for my own work. I’ve hardly used Illustrator before, so I also took this week as an opportunity to learn a new software (it was not easy). I made three expressive words: Falling, Gemini, and Mountain

I had a hard time figuring out what words I wanted to use, and then I realized that for each design I did, I wanted to tell a story with the shapes of the letters. For Falling, I thought it would be fun to play around with the placement of the letters, and make them characters in a story, where the “g” was falling and all the other letters were reacting. I typed the letters on an arced path and then messed with the spacing to try to tell my story.
I asked my roommates what they thought the story was, and they thought it showed the “n” pushing the “g” off and the “g” falling. What I was trying to show was the opposite; the “n” was supposed to be trying to help the “g”.

I messed around with the end of the “n” to see if I could make it look like an outreached hand. I moved the dot on the “i” to the right and realized it looked like a head. I added a tear falling from the head and then moved the second “l” closer to the “i” so it would look like the “l” was comforting the “i”. The two lines coming off the “g” and first “l” are meant to be cartoonish panic. I also created the words in 3 sizes because I wanted to see how it would change in different sizes. I made minor changes, filling in the tear and increasing the stroke size of the panic indicators. This was the final result:

For the second word, Gemini, I really wanted to play with the idea of the twins and duality that the zodiac sign is associated with. There’s a lot of symmetry in this word; there’s 6 letters, two “i’s” and an “m” that could all be messed around with. I started with a sans serif font and then decided to go with the “i’s” and incorporate the Gemini symbol in there. I increased the tracking and made the weight of the glyphs really light so that I could draw more attention to the lines of the symbol. This was the result:

I was out of ideas for my third word. I kept thinking of nature-associated words, and tried to mess around with “river” or “flowing”, but it was a bit too similar to “falling”. I moved from “river” to “hills” and from there to “mountain”. I tried to use symmetry in this design too, but I wanted it to feel jagged and less uniform than “gemini”. I found a handwritten font and started messing around with different shapes and widths. I wanted to show the peak of a mountain without any illustrations. I decided to completely warp the “n” since I realized it already had the kind of shape I needed and it was in the middle of the word, which allowed me to use symmetry. I typed the word on an arced path for this word as well.

Creating a Monogram

I found this part of the assignment much more challenging than the expressive words. I started out with “PJ” in Bourbon Street Regular, a font I saw in an Illustrator tutorial I watched that I really liked.

I started warping the letters to see what I could come up with. I accidentally flipped the tail of the “j” and ended up really loving how it looked. I wanted more out of my monogram though, and tried flipping the “j” over to see how it would look.

I realized it looked just like the Gemini symbol that I had used for my expressive word. Being a Gemini and astrology is a big part of my creative identity, so I decided to really lean into this. I didn’t want the “j” to get lost in the symbol though, so I decided to make a smaller “j” inside the symbol like this. This was the final result:

Creating a Business Card

I wanted to play with the concept of duality even more for my business card. I tried out some gradients, but then decided color blocking would be more effective. I created a split background and then duplicated my monogram to create a version that was half white, half black. I know there’s a better way to do this via Illustrator Effects -> Pathfinder but I wasn’t able to crack it. This was the final business card: