For my typeface, I chose to respond to Jamie's connection to his ipod as an item which stores his music collection for which he is extremely fond of. I also wanted to reflect his bright, friendly, and playful personality. I chose an easygoing typeface which is easy on the eye and communicates a less serious context. I found this typeface extremely suitable when working with the rounded headphone design. I used headphones simply as a single object that could communicate Jamie's love of music. My colour choices were based upon Jamie's colourful personality and dress sense, and also to reflect the kind of music he likes; 90's, dance and cheesy house, which is music associated with bright, often even florescent colours.
I think the elements that work well are the simplicity; the headphones are a straightforward way of getting across a specific part of his personality. I also feel that the typeface I chose to base my design on work very well with the imagery. I think that despite my doubts, the typeface is actually very legible, and works well when presented as a word as well (the name badge). Having designed most of the alphabet in a fairly formulaic way, I felt worried when it came to designing the letters which I couldn't really fit the formula to, like the 's', 'z', 'i', 'j', 'm' and 'n'. However, after re-tracing each design many many times I think I got there in the end. I think there are often going to be slight objections to the rule, but you can't let yourself get too obsessive about it.
Initially I felt the colour scheme worked well, but in the final crit, and from my conversations with classmates the general consensus was that perhaps less would be more.... perhaps a more restricted use of colour would create a more striking typeface. I had tried to balance the colours, using the lime green and the bright blue to follow the outline of the letterforms as I felt they were tonally similar but not too distracting, and the bright red only in a small area so it would not draw the eye straight to it, but balance with the other colours. I also arranged the colour scheme so that every letter, (even if the letter only had one headphone) had a little of each colour as I felt that it needed some kind of formula. However I think it ended up looking as though I had just coloured the letters in!
Suggestions for improvement in the crit included a coloured background, leaving the headphones white. I can see why this would work well, as the white ipod and cable is such an iconic symbol. Strangely enough, this was a colour scheme that I had worked with in my preliminary sketches. Equally, I think that perhaps using just one colour to highlight specific sections of each pair of headphones might work well.
Now I would like to experiment with variations of this typeface, for instance capital letters, italics, bold, other colour schemes and also using it for something like a piece of print working with it to create words.
Above is the typeface that Arthur designed for my personality. From looking at his work, I think that he has tried to capture a hippy-like element to my personality. The typeface is fairly formal and in capital letters. Perhaps this is to represent a more serious side to me, while the feathered areas show more of my messy, chaotic side. I think that it is extremely visually interesting, and it is very much to my taste as I love illustrative typography and delicate detail. I especially like the way he has only left the bare minimum of each letter; just enough to make it legible within the feather. In terms of what is ineffective about this typeface; I really think the typeface suits me, however I don't know how apparent that would be to someone who didn't know me well already. Also I think this type face is very sophiscicated in black and white, and very neat; which are two things I could not easilly describe myself as! However, for the name badge, Arthur created a collage, and used blue and silver which I felt worked really well. I am really impressed with the way that Arthur actually managed to create a typeface so appealing to my own personal taste.
