Expressing Meaning

The first of this week’s Learning Activities is focused around arranging text, in a creative way, emphasizing it’s meaning.

First we got to make up our own word, one which doesn’t exist. So I ended up with Playhem! This is the combination of the words Play and Mayhem, which is the moment during play-time when your children are throwing stuff around the room, painting on the walls, and giving you a part-time job when you have to clean up after them.

In the second part of this activity, we got to choose two words from a list of twelve words. These two words, along with the one we made up, was going to be put in three different compositions, and restricted to one typeface per composition, in an A4 format. I chose Agony and Slimy, to go along with my word, Playhem.

These are my final compositions (process is detailed after the images):

The Process

Playhem

For the word Playhem, I chose to make a mess of the letters. The word was inspired by the situation we’re in now (Corona-outbreak and no kindergarten), and how trying to keep a moderately tidy home is futile.

The decision to use colors didn’t happen before I started making it in Illustrator, because it seemed like the “obvious” choice. The colors are of course the colors of the rainbow. OneBrush was the font choice for this one, because it seemed playful, and it looks like kids have painted the letters.

Sketches:

Agony

I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted to present the word Agony, but I decided to do some sketches, to see if any better options presented themselves. It seems like the first idea was the better one, so I cut up the word in Illustrator, and set the tracking very tight and claustrophobic. I used Incubus Italic for this word, because of its rawness, and it looks like it was written with a knife.

Sketches:

Slimy

The first thing I did for this word was to search for an appropriate font, which ended up being Flavors, because of the slime-looking dots around it, and the organic shapes themselves. I then tried to figure out how to modify these letters to represent slime. The letters are drooping down to the right, and almost sliding down the frame of the A4 sheet. The green and yellow colors were based on slime that you can buy in toy stores.

Sketches: