Alphabet Soup: Typeface

 We got given a brief to create a typeface based on a personality/character of a partner picked from random in our Graphic Design group. My partner was Andrea Cooper so I then questioned her to find aspects of her personality which would aid me in creating a suitable typeface.

The results: 

Aspects that i thought were interesting and thought i might consider as a focus were how she acted as a rock for her family as they'd been through a lot and she appeared as a very strong person. She seemed to have a lot of cultural experience as she'd moved a lot and in particular Denmark, where she very proudly had adopted the language. Being Danish seems to be a big part of who she is and therefore i could use this aspect of her personality within the typeface. I also found it interesting as the Danish language is very different and hard compared to the english language.

5 Keywords and 5 tag words

5 A's on 'big' and 'feeling' 5 B's 'open' and 'power'

First i started playing around with the extra danish letters in the alphabet and the theme of being the rock of the family as well as the fact that she is open-minded. However i didn't feel much success or enthusiasm whilst attempting these. The rock affect wasn't coming through enough to be clear that it was  that texture and line that was meant to be representing that aspect of her personality, it just looked like a jagged line or weird blocks. This lead me to stress as to how to approach this brief. I decided to clear my head and write out what different ideas i could form from her personality/character.

I had a different range of ideas from this but nothing seemed strong enough or connected enough in representation. I was cramming my head with different ones, trying to combine all in one and it wasn't working so i started to look at the points separately. 


When i looked at misunderstood in connection with cultural i thought how could i make letters look misunderstood? This lead me to try combine a letter with the following such as A and B, then B and C and so on.


After drafting each letter, playing around with different options to combine them i ended up with these:

Although in early stages i quite like how its going.
In my progress crit it was suggested that i could play around with combining all different letters, not following the alphabet order, as well as incorporate more aspects of her personality i spoke about in it as although the idea of combining the letters together was a good idea, it needed to be more clear as to what it was representing. 
After that was when i tweaked them to look better and added serifs to represent how she is the stable factor within her family. The combination of the letters are meant to represent the combination of her two languages (Danish and English, which ironically have the same flag in opposition of colours, these being a factor of her culture as Denmark was the first place with a flag), as well as her experience of different places. Her name also meaning manly even though its a female name adds another duel prospect of her personality which could be said is shown in the duel combination of the letters. 

As you can see the extra letters in the Danish alphabet also share similar qualities as my initial idea which i thought was important as being Danish is such a big part of her and her character.

I want to play around with the thickness and fill of the letters i have created as so far i was just getting a shape in place as to how they will combine, now i want to shape them into more of her personality.