Love Development 2

In the last post, I mentioned love letters and how the calligraphic typeface looked similar to hand writing. It was a way to link the typography to the emotion, using colour to also back it up. I thought it would be interesting to make a response using my own handwriting, to see if it helps to communicate a love letter more effectively. This is the development of the idea, starting from paper to screen:

I wrote out the words 'wake up' and 'face', what I was using in my previous experiments, and scanned them in. I then erased any pencil marks I missed before scanning, adjusted the levels and created a new layer with a flat black fill.

I saved it as a psd and placed the file into illustrator, where I traced and expanded the image - getting rid of any white. I thought a stroke would be easier to work with, so I started tracing over the best examples of individual letters, and combined them into a final word.

I tidied up the stroke, making it more rounded whilst keeping a hand rendered quality. I then expanded the object and made it flow by adjusting the joins between the letters.

Below shows how I took samples of each attempt and combined them into a final word that best represented handwriting in a consistent way. I repeated the process of tidying the letterforms before applying it to the same experimental template I have been using for the other examples.

Although it is a nice idea, the notion of handwriting on a typographic poster doesn't sit well with me. It doesn't suit the uniform examples of type that I am using now, and looks crudely done. I guess my handwriting isn't the best. I think calligraphy would be best suited to represent these words, as it has a hand-rendered quality to the letterforms whilst still retaining the delicate beauty that a typeface should hold. Although I would love to do my own calligraphy, it's a skill in itself that I don't think I could do justice on a typographic piece of design.