Typography Project

Before:

I was really inspired by this project because I've seen so many creative visuals simply created by type, placement and color.  I kind of went a little overboard on this project, and chose a rather intricate and difficult object, but I love challenges and love working with images, so this was still really fun.  This is the bee I decided to use to create my typographic image.


After:

The assignment was to create a visual using only typography to represent an image with different placements of words and shapes, and using color as well.  The objective of this assignment was to work with typographical conveyance. I chose to create a bee, as I mentioned already, because I wanted to be able to use various elements of the insect and use a shamble of words to create the image.  I decided to use text that described the bee's body parts, actions that the bee does, and the colors to strongly convey the message (head, antenna, eyeball, flying, thorax, abdomen, leg, black and yellow).

The type looks randomly placed, and in some instances it is, but I warped and aligned the text to create the flow of the body parts of the bee.  I used smaller, repetitive type on the connecting part of the wing to the body to create the illusion that the wings are getting bigger.  I used bold, italics, font size and text warping to create the smaller and larger texts.  The warping allowed me to create text that contoured to the lines perfectly. Each style of warping played its own part in creating each part of the bee.  Without the movement and style of text, this project couldn't have been created.  I also rotated the text a lot, flipping the words to create a unique texture and placement.

The colors of bees are universally known, so it was important to use black and yellow in the abdomen of the body to help the viewer realize they were looking at a bee.  Although I used standard bee colors in the abdomen (to help recognize the insect) I wanted to use a variety of browns to show the different body parts like the head, thorax, and the legs.  By using colors that one would see in a bee in nature, the overall feel of the design really emphasizes the purpose and the theme of the project.

I used a lot of warp text effects to alter the shapes of the words, because I wanted to create the texture of the bee. The rotation of each word was planned accordingly to the position of the other words and the shape I was trying to create. I used a variety of sizes of type, but used the same style of font to keep it unified and connected throughout. I chose a sans-serif font because I knew I'd be using a lot of words, and the cleaner the text was, the more words I could use.  I probably could have used less text to make it simpler for the viewer.  But I got carried away on some parts creating depth with layering text to create texture.

There isn't a specific intended audience for this design, because I feel it is pretty universal with the choice of color and shape.  This could be used anywhere from design books, to children's books, to magazines and insect books.

The use of proximity and repetition in this project was crucial for the success of this image.  Every word had to be close to each other to create the feeling of movement and emphasis.  Without the repetition of words and the specific placement of each, the message would have been lost amongst empty white space and confusing lines.