ALPHABET SOUP// Workshop - Illustrator

Today I made some experimental letters for the Illustrator Brief. Using Illustrator as a sketchbook is quite easy however I have an annoying tendency to delete ideas I don't like or think have failed. This means there is very little evidence of my exploration of ideas. To fix this I began taking lots and lots of screenshots, here are some of the ideas I was playing with earlier.

These three designs began as my favorite idea, however the more I experimented with different layouts and letters I realised that the pattern would not look uniform across all the letters, some would be heavy set and others barely readable. Also I do not like it aesthetically, there is not much going on and it is fairly hard to look at. 

I really liked the hand-drawn version of this I drew for the initial alphabet soup project, my word I had to follow was 'POP'. The theory is that lots of minor 'explosions' are spreading trails across the negative space left by a the shape of a letter, when they hit a side they stop. As there are multiple 'explosions' some of the trails overlap and eventually they form the shape of a letter.

I really had to practice my illustrator skills to get this idea rolling. This also allowed me to experiment with many different ways I could work with this idea, for example with a multitude of existing typefaces and font-styes as well as experimenting with the use of black and white space, and negative space. 

Eventually I chose to use lower case Futura as a template for the design, I chose this because it is a Modernist typeface; clean and undecorative which should allow the viewer to work out the shape of the letter even when its just made up from a mash-up of lines. I chose to use lower case because of the increased number of curves in the lettering. These curves allow the trails to hit a side and terminate, instead of continuing along a straight line for a long time which is not as aesthetically pleasing in my opinion. (I prefer the lines to suggest the shape of the letter bounding them instead of the lines becoming structural body's themselves)

This is a screenshot from a process which end with the letter looking like the ones above. However I like the way the lines distract the perspective of the letter here, I plan on looking into perspective when I place the letters on a poster layout in illustrator for print.