DES 121 Type and Communication Design

Professor Cielle Charron

Pressure Makes Diamonds

I created this with the objective of creating text that appeared to be what it says. I made the text "DIAMONDS" appear like diamonds by adding facets to the interior of the outlined letters and using a diamond for the O instead of the letter. My kerning was uniform throughout the text, and the spacing was as close as I could get it. In order to emphasize the word diamond, I made it appear like what is described, but I also made it the only word that did so. Whereas "Pressure" and "Makes" were the same height, weight, and width, this makes the reader focus on the word that is different and therefore the subject of the piece.

Forelsket

For this project, we were assigned to create a symbol that represents a word from another language that does not translate neatly into English. For my word, I chose the Norwegian word “Forelsket”, which briefly translates to, “The euphoric feeling at the beginning of love”, but the word itself is more complex than that. The closest approximation that I could find is the English word “crush”, however, instead of describing the act of having a crush on someone, it more describes the feeling towards that person.

Since the word was Norwegian, I wanted to incorporate ancient Norse runes into my design, I decided to incorporate the Elder Futhark rune “Wunjo” which translates to “joy”, and in the alphabet, it is the equivalent of the Latin W. For the design itself I wanted to derive the Celtic and Norse designs from pre-colonization. The designs often consist of simple designs that utilize a lot of lines and shapes organized along a central movement line. To do this I used the rune as a central line and added lines and shapes to create movement around it. I used lines to add tension and organic shapes to add movement. To tie in my typography, I used the same runic alphabet but altered some of the symbols that wouldn’t be recognizable I had to flip the E onto its side and had to flip the L vertically. I added the same lines to the type that I did to the symbol and created a hierarchical structure that leads to the definition of the word

Sources

  • ​​​​​​​Elder Futhark Runes: Mountfort, P. R. (2003). Nordic runes : understanding, casting, and interpreting the ancient Viking oracle. Destiny Books.

  • Daniel McCoy, Norse Mythology for Smart People, norse-mythology.org, Accessed 25 November 2020