Letter Arts Review

A couple images from recent Letter Arts Review magazines as inspiration.

Cursive Inspired Typography

Ale Paul's Piel Script

As it's name suggests - 'piel' is Spanish for 'skin' - Piel Script is a Latin script, based on a basterdized version of Burgues Script and designed specifically for tattooing. Argentinean typographer Ale Paul created it after receiving requests for a typeface suitable for tattoo work. He researched tattoo culture nad found that most lettering is taken from just a few typefaces.

"Although the initial sketches were infused with some 1930's showcard lettering, most of the important decisions were reached by observing whatever strengths and weaknesses can be seen in tattoos using Burgues," explains Paul.

"OpenType technology lets you play with different alternates. So when you do lettering or a design for a tattoom you want some uniqueness and you don't want to repeat the glyphs like a machine. With Piel Script you can access a lot of different ways to write the same word.

"It is typography, after all, no matter how unusual the method or medium. A very personal kind of typography too. The messages being typeset were commemorating friends, family, births, deaths, loves, principles and things that influenced people in a deep and direct way, so much so that they choose to etch that influence on their bodies forever."

Article from Computer Arts, Issue 187, Page 53

Typographer Dennis Payongayong based this cute typographical piece on the principles of cursive hand writing. Also incorporated is an anchor, telling a story, with only one word.

Selection of Cursive Typographical Images
(Sources unknown)

Cursive

Cursive (from Latin curro, currere, cucurri, cursum, to run, hasten) is any style of handwriting that is designed for writing notes and letters quickly by hand. In the Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic writing systems, the letters in a word are connected, making a word one single complex stroke.

In the United States of America, the name of "cursive" is most commonly used to describe this style of writing. In the United Kingdom and in Ireland, the phrase "joined-up writing", "real writing" or "joint writing" is far more commonly used, while the term "running writing" or just "cursive" is most commonly used in Australia. Cursive is also commonly known as simply "handwriting" in Canada and New Zealand. Cursive is considered distinct from the "printing" or "block letter" style of writing, in which the letters of a word are unconnected, and from "print-writing", which is a cross between cursive and printing, with some unconnected letters and some connected.

In Roman cursive, the letters are not connected. In the research domain of handwriting recognition, this writing style is called "connected italic", to indicate the difference between the phenomenon of italic script and sloppy appearance of individual letters ("cursive") and the phenomenon of connecting strokes between letters, i.e., a letter-to-letter transition without a pen lift ("connected cursive").

The origin of the cursive style is associated with practical advantages (writing speed, sparse pen lifting avoids ink smudges with the quill) and the individuality of the provenance of a document, as opposed to machine font.

NOTION magazine

NOTION magazine is currently one of my favourite magazines for modern art and culture selling at the moment. It's not only the content that I find really interesting but I also think their style of layout is something that I find really interesting and really on trend and modern.

It works well using minimalist layouts, keeping in grids and column systems that make it look great and simple, but also in keeping technically when it comes to graphic design and magzine layout.

American Psycho - Patrick Bateman

As written by Bret Easton Ellis, Bateman is the ultimate stereotype of yuppie greed: rich, shallow, and addicted to sex, drugs, and conspicuous consumption. All of his friends look alike to him, to the point that he often confuses one for another, and they often confuse him for other people. Bateman takes delight in obsessively detailing virtually every single feature of his always-designer clothes, workout routine, business cards, alcoholic drinks, as well as his elaborate high-end stereo and home theatre sound system. He is engaged to an equally rich, shallow woman named Evelyn Williams. They can't stand each other, but they stay together for the sake of their social lives. He has a mistress on the side (the fiancée of a gay colleague whom he holds in great contempt and who makes repeated, hapless sexual advances towards Bateman) and has regular liaisons with prostitutes and women he encounters at clubs, many of whom end up being his victims. The one woman (and possibly the one person) in his life he has anything-approaching feelings for is his secretary, Jean. He just cannot bring himself to seduce, rape or kill her, perhaps because she is the only person in his life who is not completely shallow. Every time he mentions Jean throughout the novel, he casually acknowledges her as "Jean, my secretary who is in love with me" and introduces her in the narration as someone whom he "will probably end up married to someday".

Bateman kills many of his victims because they make him feel inadequate, usually by having better taste than he does. His friends mock him as the "boy next door", his own lawyer refers to him as a "bloody ass-kisser... a brown-nosing goody-goody", and people often dismiss him as “yuppie trash” outside of his social circle.

Bateman often expresses doubts regarding his own sanity, and he has periodic attacks of psychosis, during which he hallucinates. He often experiences feelings of depersonalization. In his own words, "although I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel my flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there." Although Bateman often claims that he is devoid of emotion, he also describes experiencing moments of extreme rage, panic or grief - being on the "verge of tears" - often over trivial inconveniences such as remembering to return videotapes or trying to obtain reservations. In the middle of dismembering a victim, he breaks down, sobbing that he "just wants to be loved". He takes psychotropics, like Xanax, to get these attacks under control.

Bateman compensates for these insecurities through obsessive vanity and personal grooming, with unwavering attention to detail. He dresses in and uses the most fashionable, expensive clothing and accessories possible (e.g. Salvatore Ferragamo and Valentino suits, Oliver Peoples glasses and Jean Paul Gaultier, Louis Vuitton and Bottega Veneta leather goods) as a means of effecting some "control" over his otherwise chaotic life. Likewise, he categorizes people by what they wear and how they look because they are more easily "understood" in terms of labels and stereotypes. Bateman's apartment also is firmly controlled in terms of look and taste, with the latest music, food, and art.

Bateman kills more or less indiscriminately, with no preferred type of victim and no consistent or preferred method of killing. Throughout the novel, he kills men, women, a child, and animals. He kills women mostly for sadistic sexual pleasure, often during or just after sex, and is also a prolific rapist. He kills men because they anger or annoy him, and the child just to see if he would enjoy it (he does not).

Periodically, he matter-of-factly confesses his crimes to his friends, co-workers, and even complete strangers ("I'm utterly insane", "I like to dissect girls") just to see if they are actually listening to him. They either are not, or think he is joking. In the climatic scene Bateman calls his lawyer and leaves a lengthy, detailed message confessing all of his crimes. He later runs into his lawyer, who mistakes him for someone else and dismisses the confession as a joke.

Paper Based Designs

1.
2.
3. These are my paper based postcard designs (all based on thumbnail sketches) for my final outcome.

1.
The lines in the background of this design represents quotes. I tried to rub these out a little to represent a low opacity, but it isn't really obvious, however, that's what I plan to do. My writing at the top I plan to be a serif font, in keeping with Patrick Bateman's 80's design. I think I'll also blur the image of his face down a little too, making the writing at the top a focus point.

2.
Using the same picture of Patrick Bateman I want to blur out his face, either normally or like they do on late night police shows and then cover his eyes with a translucent coloured box, with the text 'illness' over the top. I think this could work quite well together.

3.
Using the word masculinity to challenge the metrosexuality of Patrick Bateman, I want to make the focus point of this postcard, the picture of Bateman. I have planned to have the wording running vertically along the opposite side of the image on the postcard, to balance out the design.

Final Layout

Mr & Mrs Basic and their pet hyena.

I thoroughly enjoyed creating this layout and enjoyed having a more structured approach to the project through the work we'd experimented and deconstructed at the beginning of this stage. Throughout the construction of this layout, I wanted to maintain a minimalist and simple standard of working. This meant using one or two fonts, simple black and white pictures and conforming almost to the letter to the grid format of the layout design we've been experimenting with and studying.

The whole idea behind the layout is to create something simple with a very balanced feel to it. The images and the text work together, taking up the same amount of space on each page and make the equilibrium of the layout work from many different angles of design. I've worked quite closely to using a column and grid arrangement.

When it comes to the type and picture layout, when viewing the pictures from the exhibition that I took, I noticed that all of them (as well as all the images exhibited by Alice Leach) are in black and white format. So when editing the pictures and beginning designing my layout etc, I knew that I wanted to keep the colours to two, black and white. I think this has worked really well for my layout and has kept everything flowing well throughout. I think if the pictures had been colour now, it wouldn't have that elegance of design that I have managed by keeping them all monotone.

I chose Courier Neue and Didot as my two typefaces for this layout design for a few reasons. Firstly, Courier Neue is currently one of my favourite fonts to use at the moment and I personally think it works quite well as a copy font. This love for Courier also stems back to owning old typewriters and the pleasing authentic aesthetic that you get from using them. Another reason I used it was, being recently inspired by NOTION magazine, that I noticed they use the same font as their copy text and it looks really great in simple layouts. My reason for using Didot was because I've realised that these serif fonts are really on trend right now. Not only that but it works well with the simplistic nature of the layout's design and the way in which I'm almost bringing the design 'back to basics' in terms of basic fonts and layout devices.

I centered everything after experimenting with smaller and larger sizes for the fonts in terms of the title as well as seeing what it would look like with one line being aligned another way to the other. This didn't work out as I'd have liked, so I centered it all as well as the header copy text and used a line as a device to balance out this part of the text.

My last thought for the layout was to add some information about the images I've used in the bottom right hand corner of the layout. Since there was quite a lot of information I wanted to portray about the images, it was quite difficult lowering the font sizes etc to the right amount to fit in the far right column. I understand that on this side of the layout I could have the text overflowing into the next column, freestanding in nature, but I wanted to keep everything working from a grid system level of understanding.

Overall, I'm really pleased with my final outcome of this project and think my final piece would be something I'd like to showcase as part of my portfolio in the future since magazine layout design is one of my passions in graphic design.