Mashup Process

Research

Font Exercise

For this exercise, I was told to choose 5 different fonts that represent me or ones that I relate to. I hate the idea of being basic and having my works lo ok exactly like the rest of the class. I knew I had an advantage with an outside app and I picked out the craziest fonts I could find that still related to me.

 

Name/ Initial Exercise

After the font exercise, we were left to discuss with the table and choose one font that was our favorite. I have very many different aspects of myself that I see reflected in all 5 of these fonts so I actually combined pieces from each of the choices to construct my name. After that, we had to send the name into Illustrator and extrude it in an isometric grid.

 

30 Mashup Words

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For this we had to combine 30 words made up of nouns and verbs/adj in our own way. Then, from that list, we chose our favorite word and made up a definition for it.

Final Mashup Deliverable

The final objective was to extrude your word in an isometric grid and in your font and illustrate the definition in the way you manipulate the word and its surroundings. I mixed in other textures because I wanted it to have some essence of realism.

 

Iterations and Production

I chose these fonts because I saw myself reflected into all of them and I was fixed on being different than everyone else. I tried out my name on each of the fonts but I wasnt really liking any of them.

Since I didn’t like my name in any of the fonts but I still liked each font individually, I combined my favorite letter from each of the fonts to form my name. I didn’t do my initials because it wouldn’t show off my fonts as well. The upside down A represents the crazy part and the normal upper case B’s show a normal, presentable side. Then backwards 3 matches with the randomness of the A and the y is normal but a bigger sized lowercase size than the B’s. It’s normal but still stands out from the rest of the letters.

I chose the word Bcharkmas because it sounded the weirdest but you could still guess what works make it up. The definition was a mix of of the definition of bark and Christmas, using both version of the word bark. I chose 2 definition instead of 1 because I couldn’t decide which one I liked better and most dictionaries include more than 1 definition.

This project took very long as I was working in an iPad and many features are not supported as they are on a laptop, but unfortunately I was out of luck with my laptop breaking down only a few weeks ago. This causes a lot of wasted time as there is no extrusion tool in iPad so I had to manually draw each line connecting the front and the back and filling in each empty space with different values of the same color. Another part that was difficult to get through was the limitation of only 4 colors. I realized we could only use 4 colors about halfway through the project and I became very discouraged because I had already picked out many appealing colors to match my theme. My creativity was lessened by this realization but I still carried on.

This was my new color palette after I saw the restrictions and I chose primary colors so that I could potentially mix them in the gradient tool to create any color in the rainbow and be less limited. I dint end up doing that because soon after working with these new colors, I realized they fit my theme already, with a few alterations on opacity and darkness. I thought my piece would look very boring, repeating the same colors but I was wrong as it looks bright and full of color.

My favorite letter is the middle A because it took the longest to get perfect and its the center of the piece and all attention is brought to it first. I also enjoy looking at the layers of pine needs, they look very aesthetic and it came together very nicely. Furthermore, it’s one of the key aspects to show the definition. Taylor first gave me the recommendation of enlarging it, to emphasis the amount of detail I put into it and to set it apart from the rest of the letters, adding importance to it. Taylor also gave me a suggestion that I really liked, where he told me to maybe make the rest of the letters as little presents underneath the tree. I took his advice but only make a couple of the letter look like presents, because I wanted to show more elements of Christmas as well. The hole for the A shows an under layer of the tree, showing the bark. This was a last minute edition as I realized I gave myself more work than everyone else and I needed to include both definitions. For the star, I added a gradient circle underneath the shape itself where the inner color was yellow and the outer color was completely transparent so it would blend better and I love the glow effect it gives.

The idea to add fallen snow on top of the letters was one of my best and I spent a lot of time to make it look good and shade it correctly for each letter. I like the winter effect it gave and some people said it reminded them of club penguin, which I found funny and I’m happy to hear that my style looks similar to theirs. This however, contradicted with Taylors idea to make all the little letters look like presents because I could have a bow and snow both on top of a letter, it would be too crowded.

This was to show the second definition of Bcharkmas, the sacred Christmas dog. I wanted it to fit the cutesy theme I had going so I didnt show an audible bark and I tried to add as many dog-ish elements as I could with it still being minimalistic and still being able to understand what letter it was. In hindsight, I should’ve given more thought to my definitions and better ways to show them but I was so focused on the Christmas theme, I just got caught up with everything else.

This was one of the last elements I added and the idea came to me the day before the final because I was making cookies with my friends and I forgot that cookies were part of christmas. I was initially going to add a snow layer on top of it but this idea came to me at the perfect time. It looks especially good next to the tree, just like cookies for Santa.


These are the textured pieces that I added to make the piece feel more real and not all cartoon. They were all made in an outside app that ive used for many many years and this app could offer things that Illustrator could never imagine. The glitter bows are self explanatory as christmas bows are shiny and sparkly. I added them on the B and M because they draw attention and the B should definitely have attention brought to it because it is the beginning letter and I thought it was being a bit overshadowed by the A tree. The M just deserved a topper to complete the ribbon look and I used silver and gold because of the classic christmas song “silver and gold”. The carpet is a bit of a longer explanation. For my family, we do Christmas on the floor, like opening gifts in our carpeted living room and so every Christmas for me holds the memory and feel of our shag carpet. The carpet color also matches the one I have at home so this addition was very personal to me and I felt it was necessary to include the textured appearance instead of hand drawing it.

 

All and all, for the amount of effort I put into this project, it came out looking amazing. Although, I know if I was working on a laptop, I could’ve done so much more but I’ve learned to work with what I have. I chose to draw my own font instead of following the previous exercise because I like doing everything myself and I like how its original and no one else could’ve copied my font. My piece is incredibly detailed from all the time and work I put into it and I did this because I was very sick and tired of our abstraction project from Design Foundations 2110 so I added as much detail as possible to balance out the anger I held from abstraction. This project was very fun to draw and I enjoyed myself throughout the whole process. Drawing things like this is calming to me and it doesn’t cause me stress because its very similar to what I used to do in high school when I was bored or trying to keep myself awake by focusing my attention on drawing or doodling. This also helped me solidify my own style and what that looks like.

Concept Statement

I knew I wanted to really show Christmas spirit but then I went a little overboard. My initial dream was to make some of the letters brown with the texture of bark on the side but I ended up not doing that after I heard Taylors recommendation and followed that instead. After that, I followed the idea of Christmas and all the things that make up Christmas. I wanted bright colors to show how vibrate and exciting this time of year is and also added a comfortable, homey feel with the shag carpet. I still managed to add some hints of the definition that fit in with christmas elements and I knew I wanted it to all be the same theme and it did. It came out much better than I imagined when I started and I’m glad I made all these decisions along the way.

Mashup