How to make typographic art in Illustrator

Learn how to fill paths with text to create typographic art

If you want to give this a go, you’ll need:

• Illustrator (I used CS4 but any version should be fine). Just download a 30-day trial from Adobe if you need it.
• A photo or image with strong sense of line

I’ve used a synoptic chart as a source image, as I’m one of those interesting people who loves to look at weather maps (any sort of map, actually). Contour lines are my favourite because aside from conveying information, they are also expressive and unpredictable. Almost poetic, if you use your imagination!

Following is the tutorial on how to make your own synoptic typography:

View this document on Scribd

Can you guess the sound?

Back in the days of catching the bus to school everyday, I remember the radio constantly blaring. There was a particular segment on one station called secret sound. A sound would be played, then listeners would call in and guess what it was. Some sounds were tricky, and took days, if not weeks to figure out. Other sounds didn’t take long to identify.

Still on a bit of a sound tangent, I thought I’d record my own secret sound and see how long it takes for you to guess!

I recorded this sound in GarageBand using the built-in microphone on my computer. In GarageBand it’s also possible to create podcasts (podcasts are informative/entertaining program files that combine pre-recorded voice, music and images). They are usually freely available and can be downloaded off the internet (the iTunes Store has a good collection of free podcasts to choose from and subscribe to, but you’ll need to download it). I might add that podcasts make a wonderful addition to your MP3 player or iPod if you happen to find yourself in Sydney using public transport.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the sound, if you’d like to guess what it might be, just leave a comment.

Note: the only prize is the satisfaction of being right (if you are right!)

When typing makes music

Okay, strictly speaking this has nothing to do with designing typefaces. However it does involve playing around with letters, so I consider it worthwhile!

As a Mac user, I’ve had GarageBand for awhile, but never really used it. I thought it was high time for some musical action!

Musical typing in GarageBand

Here are the keystrokes I used to play the basic melody of ‘The Entertainer’ (a ragtime classic from Scott Joplin, c.1902):

sed k d k d k klp; kl; jlk

sed k d k d k hgt hk; lkl

sed k d k d k klp; kl; jlk

kl; kl; klk; kl; klk; kl; jlk

You will probably recognise the tune instantly once you have a listen:

GarageBand is a great way to experiment with sound and music, even if music isn’t your strong point. Unfortunately I only have one and a half songs in my repertoire. Maybe I should start learning piano again. One of the really cool features of GarageBand is the ability to turn your keystrokes into sheet music. You don’t need to know anything about music theory to do this (unless you want to play it again on an actual piano!)

Sheet music sample from 'The Entertainer'

Is this a bug’s doing?

Bug-bitten sunflower leaf with the letter 'Y' cut out of it.

This is a leaf from one of my sunflower plants. At 12cm (4.75 inches) wide, the above leaf is a relatively small one, plucked from near the base. One of the plants is now over 170cm tall and still growing, so I’m really looking forward to the flower! It’ll probably be the size of a dinner plate.

So did a bug do this? No, but I wish one did, it would’ve made my day!

Actually, a small pair of stainless steel scissors were the culprit. The bugs did contribute to the munched-out holes though. It would have been nicely authentic if they chewed out the ‘Y’ as well.

Every day, I check the plants to make sure they aren’t getting eaten too badly (trying to avoid using pesticides). However, some leaves are getting eaten a fair bit, and seeing the holes gave me the idea to do more damage and cut out a letter shape from the leaf.

So there it is, the letter ‘Y’. Why? I’m not sure, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Stay tuned, when the sunflowers finish and start dying, I may just strip all the leaves down and cut out the whole alphabet!

Sesame Street 40th Anniversary

This week has seen the 40th Anniversary of Sesame Street, and Google has celebrated with a series of innovative custom logos.

Sesame Street Ensemble

For those who never had the opportunity to watch, Sesame Street is an educational children’s program. It uses animation, puppets and actors to familiarise pre-school aged children with letters, words, and numbers. I remember watching it from the age of three or four. Very entertaining!

Have a look at some of the past week’s logos: Sesame Street 40th Anniversary Google Logos. There’s one logo in particular I want to draw attention to, I think it’s the most clever of all, can you guess why?

Count von Count Google Logo

Yes, the designer of this logo used numbers instead of actual letters. Usually when you want to spell something out, you use letters (now wasn’t that groundbreaking!) However, the designer has discovered that numbers can look like letters. A good designer wouldn’t try a trick like this unless it has some sort of meaning or significance. In this case, the purple character is named Count von Count, and he likes to… count. So using numbers is completely appropriate.

Now, take a step back to childhood with the Count and his batty bats. Some degree of amusement is guaranteed!

How to make your own alphabet using Google Earth

The Earth's surface offers a goldmine of potential letterforms.

For the uninitiated, Google Earth offers an exciting way to explore the world with interactive satellite images, without even leaving your room!

The above letterforms I sourced from the Tweed Shire in NSW, Australia. The letter ‘H’ is actually the high school I attended for six years, and the letter ‘r’ is a motorway I have driven on a number of times! ‘A’ and ‘T’ are sugar cane fields (from separate farms), and ‘E’ is a residential canal development.

Finding letters in a satellite view of the landscape is by no means a new undertaking, however it is rather painstaking! Graphic designer Rhett Dashwood sourced the entire alphabet from aerial images of Victoria (read the article about his accomplishment). As far as I know, Dashwood was the first to create an alphabet from Google Earth.

If you want to harvest your own letters from the landscape, it’s relatively simple:

1. Download Google Earth, if you haven’t already.
2. Zoom in to a low altitude (an ‘Eye alt’ of about 15kms or less is ideal).
3. Explore! Once you’ve found a feature that looks like a letter, take a screenshot (shift+command+3 for Macs, or for Windows press ‘print screen’ on keyboard [or alt+Prt Sc]).
4. Open the screenshot in an image editing program (i.e. Photoshop/Gimp).
5. Crop to a tight square, to eliminate the surrounding landscape.
6. Save As (type in letter name, i.e. A, B… whatever it looks like).
7. To make words, you’ll need to open a new document in the image editor.
8. Duplicate (or copy+paste) the letters from separate files as new layers in the document.
9. Arrange using the Move tool. When you’ve spelt out your message, save the file as a psd, then save a copy as a jpg.

A few tips:

• Search over land, near cities or areas with human occupation. As far as I know, remote deserts and oceans don’t yield many letters!
• It might be an idea to attach placemarks (those bright yellow pins) to the places that you find letters, for future reference (I wish I did this).
• Searching for the alphabet on Google Earth can be time-consuming. If you widen your search area, it may be a lot easier to find letters.
• Be adventurous!

Human alphabet

'Invest in Hope' - Commonwealth Bank breast cancer awareness campaign

A recent advertisement on the Commonwealth Bank website caught my eye. The words ‘INVEST IN HOPE’ were spelt out using women in various postures to form the letters. The promotion was concerned with breast cancer awareness.

Using the human form for lettering isn’t a new technique (just try searching youtube for ‘human alphabet’) however it happens infrequently enough in corporate advertising to be a novelty. Edginess, creativity, and humanity aren’t what you tend to expect from a large financial institution. I think that’s part of the reason the ad works!

It goes to illustrate how important creative thinking can be when choosing a message-appropriate typeface for advertisements. If the words had been set in Arial or Times New Roman, I probably would not have even noticed the ad.

Tactile type

'curl' - lettering made from dried palm fronds

Experiments with type often involve the use of found objects.

This is an experiment I did using palm fronds. The process was very simple: scrounge around in the garden and collect dried palm fronds. I could have just as easily used green fronds, but they wouldn’t have had the curled-up look (and I would’ve had to attack the poor palm tree!)

The fronds were broken apart and placed together to form letters. I only made four letters of the alphabet, it would have taken considerably more time to build an entire alphabet! Especially if numbers and punctuation marks were included.

Anyway, my main purpose for doing this was to see how light affects shape and creates new letterforms (the shadows).

See a comparison of the letters: ‘Curl’ – light and shadows

Jiyeon Song: designing with light

Imagine for a moment: typography that uses no ink, no pixels and has no physical form. It can move, fade in and out, and change throughout the day.

The ‘One Day Poem Pavilion’ is an amazing creation by media designer Jiyeon Song. It produces such type. An artist or curator might call it a time-based installation. A key feature is that people arriving at different intervals will receive a different message to people arriving earlier or later on. The poem starts at 8am and finishes at 4pm (weather permitting), as it’s powered by the sun.

Take a look:

What is ‘typography’?

First of all, what is typography? What does a typographer do?

According to The Digital Designer’s Jargon Buster by Alastair Campbell, typography is ‘the art of type design and its arrangement on a page’.
A typographer designs the look and feel of letters, numbers and symbols. Some typefaces (especially those that look handwritten or handmade) are created by designers who have drawn inspiration from real world objects and processes.

While out in the backyard the other day, I noticed hundreds of densely scattered sunflower seeds (yes for some reason they were spilt all over the place) and started playing with them (as you do). As I was scraping back areas with a rigid card to reveal bare concrete, I realised it was quite interesting to make letterforms by contrasting empty space with the seeds:

Sunflower seeds make 'TYPE'.

It was great fun needless to say, and the process of doing so has opened up further experiments, such as: what sort of letterforms can be made using food and organic products?

Now, for some action typography that’s not quite organic, but is certainly very clever and experimental, take a look at the making of the Toyota iQ Font: