Experimental Typography: Painted Garden

This project drew inspiration from the magazine FUSE, which focused on the exploration and experimentation of visual language forms. This assignment asked us to explore a theme related to underlying tendencies in communication, and their effects. From there, we were to create a typeface reflecting that concept. 

Without much opportunity to do so, this was a great chance to create a design from physical materials, instead of working completely on a computer. Buying materials to create 52 letterforms seemed too expensive, so the solution was to spend time searching the garden for naturally occurring letterforms in the plants. My grandmother’s garden, a giant rambling creation of her time, energy, and patience that she loves dearly, provided the materials and inspiration. It was surprising to see forms pop out at me, and challenging to problem solve lowercase, curving letters out of plants. 

process

After finding plants to create my letterforms, they were laid out on a tarp and white linen cloth under a covered patio in the middle of the day. This formed the background for the plant-forms and the light was perfect for photographing. Letter forms appear by manually manipulating the plants, as well as finding plants which naturally take those shapes. Once these shapes were created, they were photographed from above to capture the full form.

These photographs were processed in Photoshop several different ways to find the effect necessary for a usable typeface. The simplest method turned out to be the best. Raising the contrast worked best to continue onto the next step of using image trace in Illustrator.

digital processing

Raising the contrast on the images and exporting them to Illustrator where they could be image traced into black and white produced strong letterforms. This created the look of plants dipped into paint and pressed into paper, or like the plants had been spray painted. Their forms created interesting negative spaces to emphasize in the poster design. For this reason I chose a white background, as well as to accentuate the letterforms.

putting it together

The negative spaces within the letterforms caused by highlights in the original photos created intriguing forms. The black and white alphabet is a compulsive creation of human nature wishing to create order out of disorder, representing a masculine attitude. The colorful abstract form resembles the garden, disorderly, overlapping, complex, and feminine. The colors chosen in the abstract piece are those of the plants that created the forms; yellow and purple flowers, and different shades of green. The forms aren’t placed with any particular pattern or rule in mind,except to recreate the overlapping nature of a garden.