The themes that I chose to research for experimental typography include different items that I enjoy or things that I found would be interesting to explore. Reflection, lasers, flowers, plants, and pastels. When considering typography I tried to think of things that I could explore and create a unique typeface from. I then created a few mood boards to help me choose a direction and find inspiration.

When making my selection on what theme I wanted to focus on for this project I considered which board I liked the look and feel of most. I considered my design style and which theme I felt would be best fitting. My design style is more simple and I have focused on a more floral pattern using greens and pinks in a lot of my portfolio projects, I felt that the monstera/ eucalyptus board best fit my style as a designer. I also wanted to make sure that I was creating something that I could look at and explore for a long time since the project was going to take a while. I wanted my project to feel relaxing and peaceful and wanted to focus on decorative typography that shows dimension, this theme seemed like the best option for the direction that I wanted to go.

For my first font draft I wanted to explore using procreate, it's a software that I don't have a lot of experience using and I saw this as a great opportunity to expand my creative knowledge. Using procreate I drew out my floral design and pasted the elements to form around the stems of the letters. Using this pixel based software created challenges for me. With each time I copied my first element the quality of the drawing would decrease, creating inconsistencies with the lines. Creating straight lines was also more challenging with procreate than in illustrator.

I completed all of the letters and moved them into illustrator. From there I image traced the letters to see if there would still be inconsistencies. I still ran into the same issue. The design was also not as strong when using the image trace tool. Since each letter would be working together to create words, this was not a good thing and I wanted the lines to be straighter and wanted the floral pattern to be consistent throughout.

I then tried using the pen tool to create each letter. This looked a lot better, but it took me an unreasonable amount of time to complete one letter and I knew that creating an entire font doing that was not going to work due to the project time restraints. So onto something else I went.

I then created a pattern, and filled the letters with the pattern. This worked, but doing so lost the consistency of the letters and made it so that the stems didn't line up with the forms of the letters which I didn't like.

This leads us to my final font design, I decided to use the pen tool to create my first drawing, and instead of using a pattern I placed the drawing with each individual letter and used the pathfinder tool to cut out the letters.

I then deleted all of the extra elements left over from the pathfinder tool to isolate my shapes. I didn't like that with the black and white version there was very little ability to personalize and make changes to the font.

I went through each letter, selected the black outline, copied it and created a new font style with that. I then took the same steps to make the bold style and repeated my process for the lowercase letters and symbols.

After completing all of my different letter forms I used a font creator to make my font downloadable. This allowed me to actually type with the font instead of placing each letter to create the final deliverable.

For my first poster draft I was going to use the pattern that I created as an extra element for the design but it felt too busy and distracted from the font itself. Having all 3 font style on one page felt overwhelming to me as well. I didn't like anything about this draft.

For my next draft I broke up the different fonts, placed all of the styles together as one and added a background for some decoration. I played with the different colors to see what shade and colors I felt created the calm feel that I was wanting with the final project. For this draft I explored with different ways that I could get the words and phrases into the presentation. This option showed very little of the font actually in use and had no description of the font which was something that needed to be included.