Alphabet Soup: Hybrid

The project 'Alphabet Soup' was an individual project in which everyone had to communicate a single word through 10 indivdual A6 images containing only one typeface. That tyeface had to be based on an existing typeface but other than that the project was open to interpretation. The word that I was given was 'Hybrid'.

Like many people, I started the project by defining the word Hybrid. I already had a rough meaning of the word, but the definition I found was: anything derived from heterogeneous sources, or composed of elements of different or incongruous kinds.

I began the project by writing down my inital ideas. This litterally involved writing down anything that came into my head which i could explore and experiment with relating to the word hybrid.
After some idea generation, I began to experiment with the structure of some letter forms. I took typefaces from the large collection that our table had gathered together from a previous day. To start with I experimented by redrawing pairs of individual letters onto grid paper and then taking aspects of each and mixing them together to create an entirely new letterform. I used this technique on several pairs of individual letters and considered the idea for the final resolution, however I started to notice that the new fonts I was creating could easily have been an existing font anyway and it made the outcome much less interesting than the process.

After realising that the technique wasnt working, I started to experiment with colour and form in some other ways using photoshop.

The letterforms are ones i've drawn from the experiments explained above. These experiments didn't really help or inspire me towards any new ideas, but I did like the bottom two experiments with morphing the letters on top of each other. At this point I was still lacking any firm ideas and I was really uninspired about how to solve the brief.
Fortunately at this point in the week we had group crits to help make sure we were meeting the brief and creating a solution that worked well. I went into the crit with very few ideas, but it was actually really helpful. I showed everyone the experiments that I had done and they agreed that alot of the experiments made results that looked as though they could have just been existing typefaces. However, I had one experiment that seemed to interest people a lot more than my others. I had taken two letterforms of the same letter (A) just as in the experiments above and then cut them each in half and stuck one half of each to the other. Everyone agreed that this was the most interesting experiment and that I should continue developing it into a resolution.

After the crit I was then alot more sure of myself and what I needed to do.
I realised at this point that it could be interesting to try and spell a word in the 10 letterforms when they were placed next to each other. Obviously the word Hybrid isn't long enough for that, so I looked up words that were synonymous. eventually I found 'Cross Breeding' and thought it would work really well to use 'CROSS BREED' across the 10 letterforms. Cross Breeding is a pretty acurate synoym for hybrid, and I thought it would be really interesting to introduce different levels of the meaning of Hybrid within the 10 letter forms.

Now that I knew what I wanted from the brief, I started experimenting by using 2 'C' characters from different fonts, cutting them and then sticking them together to create a hybrid letter. This worked really successfully from the first try and I knew that i'd found a good resolution to the brief. Although I used the same style for each letter, I wanted to change the outcome of each letter using different methods within the original. Here I explain in detail how I have manipulated each letterform to its final result (some letters appear more than once but each is explained in the sequence that they would be seen in the words CROSS BREED). It is also important to note that the characters I start with on each letter are always the same character as the end result. For example, the C is made from 2 C's of different fonts and the R is made from 3 R's of different fonts. All of these letters were created in Adobe Photoshop.

C - For this C, I used characters from the fonts called 'Harrington' and 'Lucida Blockletter'. I chose these fonts because I knew they would make the best end result. The fonts are very different in style. Although both fonts are relatively script based, 'Lucida Blockletter' is much more similar to a Gothic font or Times New Roman in it's slightly blockier and refined structure.
I started by selecting half of one letter with the box select tool and deleting it. For the Lucida Blockletter C, I chose to cut it just after an interesting stem-like stroke through the curve of the C. I cut the Harrington character in the same way but on the opposite side and then simply pulled the remaining halves together to create the C. I think that this is one of the most successful examples because of its simplicity and the way in which the two contrasting fonts create an entirely more dynamic letterform.

R - This R used a very similar technique to the above C but used 3 characters instead of 2 to create the resulting letterform. The fonts that I used to create the R were 'Kino MT', 'Nueva Std' and 'Lucida Calligraphy'. Again, I thought these fonts would be most intersting because they are really different in composition and should create the most effective end result. Kino MT is a very bold and straight cut font. It reminds me most of a kind of eastern european propaganda style font. From this font I only used the really bold curve of the R. I didn't need to use much of this letter because it is so bold that it stands out on its own even from a small part of the finished letterform. The main stem and largest serifs of the letter are made from Lucida Calligraphy. This is quite a bold font, but it flows really precisely as the name suggests with Calligraphy. I then used Nueva as the leg. I think this makes a really good collaboration of letters because of the massive variety in size.
During the evaluation, Jo decided that this was the strongest of all the letters.

O - I think that the O is one of the most interesting of the characters because it is the only one to use only outlined characters with no fill colour. I decided to use this style because It was an idea that I had to express the word Hybrid. I wanted to experiment with layering to litterally mix characters into each other and this is the result. I started by taking individual letter O's into Adobe Illustrator. The fonts that I used for this letterform were 'Lucida Handwriting', 'Imprint MT Shadow', 'Edwardian Script ITC' and 'Chaparral Pro'. Once I had the letters in individual Illustrator documents, I used Text -> Outline to make the program outline the inside and outside of each font creating a line drawing with no fill. Unfortunately, I had never used illustrator before now and had a lot of problems with exporting the image after applying the outlines. I decided that this was because the Outline process was only for use within the program to help with visibility or editing as a kind of mask. When exported as an image file, the result looked just like orginal black character again. As an easy way around this problem, I used the Mac OS Grab tool to print screen and then exported the result into photoshop. There is almost certainly another way to do this, but with my lack of experience in illustrator I really had no idea how I would do it. Once the outlined characters were all in photoshop, I used the magic wand to remove the white fill around and inside the outlines and then just layered them all on top of each other in a composition that I thought looked best as an O and showed that it was created from several different fonts. This letterform worked really well because the inside and outside outline of each letter O makes it look as though are double the number of characters being used and helps support the idea of Hybrid.

S - This first S is another really simple style of the C and R above. I used the fonts 'Century Schoolbook', 'Colonna MT' and 'Eccentric Std'. These fonts are really intersting to use, especially the Colonna MT font because of it's already split composition. I also knew that the difference in serifs between the other two fonts would compliment each other in the finished letterform. I used Colonna for the center of the S because this part had the best split in the letter. I then used Century Schoolbook for the large serifed base of the S and Eccentric for the top serifed curve. I think this letter worked well in the group of 10, but on its own is one of the weakest of the finished letterforms.

S - For this second S, I decided to take an approach that was loosely based on the letter O more than any of the other letterforms. I started like the others by choosing fonts that I thought would contrast and make the most interesting result. The fonts that i chose to work with were 'Handwriting Dakota', 'Eurostile', 'Herculanum', 'Papyrus' and 'Letter Gothic Std'. These fonts have a great mix of styles and sizes so they I knew they would work well together as an obvious solution to portraying hybrid. I typed the S in each font with photoshop on seperate layers and then places the S's over one another. I then changed the opacity of each of the layers. I made each layer have different amounts of opacity to create loads of different tones through the image. This effect also worked really well because the transparency is relative to the layers. So just like working with physical materials, the parts where layers overlap become a mixture of the two opacities and create a darker area. I think that this example is really interesting and works well to express the word hybrid.

B - The B works in the same way as the first letters, piecing together parts of 3 different fonts to create the result. The fonts that I used were 'Apple Chancery', 'Trajan Pro' and 'Mistral'. The process was exactly the same as in the other examples of this technique. I like this letter because it conforms easily to the style of the 10 letterforms, but I don't think it is as strong as some of the others. Towards these last few letter forms I was becoming less pleased with the outcome. I'm not sure why this is, but it could have been because I was concentrating too much on trying to make the letterform look right instead of making it express the word hybrid.

R - For this R i used an entirely different method. I started by finding a strong font which I thought was clear and bold. This for was called 'Modern No. 20'. The font also has really interesting composition and I really like the strong serif of the R. I typed the R into photoshop, and then duplicated it's layer twice to get 3 layers with the identical character on each. I then rasterised two of the layers, turning their vector based letter R into a bitmapped image so that it could be manipulated. I then used the warp tool to disfigure each rasterised layer, creating a manipulated letter. The end result works really well and looks as though the letterform has been created from lots of different string-like letters.

E - This E was created from the fonts 'Bookman Old Style' and 'Brush Script'. These are good contrasting fonts because Bookman is a very structured looking serious font similar to Times New Roman, where as Brush script is a really free flowing style of font. I used the same method as I have for most letterforms by cutting each font up and sticking the different halves together. This letterform works well in the group but stands weakly on its own as a typeface or a representation of hybrid. I think that some more tweaking of this letterform could improve it drastically and possibly the incorporation of another font to give it slightly more edge and make the outline a bit choppier.

E - This E works in the same way as the E above, but has the twist of added imagery. I used the fonts 'Script MT Bold' and 'Poplar Std' to create the letterform. I like the way that the inside curve of the E is completely lost, making it look more like a '£' symbol than an E, even though it has been created from E's. I think the most successful part of this letter is the image that i have included in the letter. I knew before I started actually creating these typefaces that i wanted to include some form of picture in the letterforms but didn't know how. Eventually i decided to use it in only one letterform and I chose the second E in Breed. After considering the imagery to use, I decided that it would have to be something closely related to the word hybrid. In fact, the first thing that I thought of when seeing the word Hybrid was the breeding of animals. I'm really interested in animals, and knew already about how common cross breeding is in domestic cats and larger wild cats too. For example, a tiger and a lion can be made to breed and create a Liger or a Tigon depending on which cat is the mother of the child. Hybrid's are common within the feline species and so i decided to focus on this for imagery. Because the letters are all black, I thought it would be best to use a black panther for the image because it would blend perfectly. I searched 'Black panther eye' on google and eventually found this image: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/31/88954713_17026aceea_m.jpg

I then desaturated it in photoshop, increased the contrast slightly and layered it on top of my letter form. I think that this overall letterform works really well, especially in the sequence of 10. Seeing the words Cross Breed spelled out of the letters definitely helps identify with this letterform. The eye is clearly not human and looking closer shows that it is obviously the easily recognisable eye of a cat or species of cat and I think that it communicates the idea of a Hybrid really well.

D - For this final letterform in the sequence I decided to use the same most common method throughout the 10 to make sure that they all linked together well with the majority of them sharing a very similar style. The fonts that I used were 'Monotype Corsiva' and 'Palatino'. Monotype Corsiva has a really dynamic, long stroke running from the top of each capital letter which worked really well when adding it to the straight Palatino font. I think that this letterform works well as a final in the sequence and does stand out as a strong letterform within the sequence.

Now that I had finished creating each letter form, I decided to add another level toward the meaning of hybrid. I had had some thoughts about linking the meaning through a hybrid of digital and reality. I thought this would be quite a strong link and work quite well because digital visuals are effectively an illusion created by controlled light, a kind of antonym to reality. After some thinking, I decided to use digital photography to photograph the letterform on the screen in different situations of the real world. I wanted to vary the environment that the photographs were being taken in, so I used a variety of locations including outside, my bedroom, the college library and one of the mens toilets. I thought that varied locations would make it more obvious that I was trying to show reality as the world around us and I don't think that would have been achieved by just taking pictures on one computer screen.
As well as altering the locations, I also changed each picture by using different screens to display the digital letterforms. I used my laptop screen, Hazel's laptop screen and the college iMacs in a couple of different places. I thought that this would help create some variety and support the point about using different locations.
I also experimented with changing the desktop wallpaper of the screen in each photograph. As above, I did this to support the variety of reality that I was trying to express. For most of the desktop wallpapers I used images that relate to my reality. The majority of them are just things that I like or things that I can relate to in some way, however the second E in BREED uses an image of a roaring panther to support the imagery included in the letterform. I had to be careful when choosing the panther image, because if I had shown a panther with it's eyes then it would have completely taken the focus from the eye imbedded in the E. By choosing this image I think it's more like two parts of one panther than two different panther images.

Here is the way that I designed the resolution to be presented. Clicking on each image will enlarge them:





I think that this resolution worked really well in all the areas I wanted it too and I think it meets the brief really well in expressing the word Hybrid. In the evaluation, Jo really liked my ideas and the way I had gone about creating the letterforms, but she didn't understand why I had taken photos of the screen. This is definitely something that could be improved on if I could figure out another way to make the ideology behind the series a bit clearer to an outside perpective.