OUGD403: SB3- Luke-A-Bet

Who the hell is Luke Massiah?
So, new week, new brief. We were assigned partners and handed a sheet of interview questions all designed to pry information. The task at hand- manipulate an existing typeface to create a brand-spanking new one including all letters of the alphabet plus six glyphs inspired by our partners. To begin our getting to know each other we asked each other the questions provided on the sheet, things such as 'What is your greatest fear?'  'How do you relax?' and 'What's your fancy dress costume of choice?' 

I wanted a few other bits of information however, in order to gain a well rounded idea of who this man was, so I got him to list what he felt were the most important characteristics of his personality, as well as giving me examples of his normal and neatest handwriting. He also drew a picture of me so I could analyse his pen work and hand skills. 

For extra information I asked for some bands he was really into and spent time listening to his styles of music whilst browsing his facebook pages for a good idea of how he spent his social/down time. After squirrelling away all these bits and bobs of information I analysed my data and drew out a spiderweb/mind map consisting of what I felt were the most important parts of who he was, whilst considering how I could translate these traits physically and in the form of letters. 

So onto visual research keeping in mind that I still needed an initial font to manipulate. From his interview answers it became clear that he was a lover of football. His earliest memories included his first football training session, his dream job would be a footballer, his favourite smells include new  football boots and the smell of grass and for the question 'If you could edit your past, what would you change?' he said that he'd wished he'd have stayed and tried harder when he was signed at Charlton Athletic football club. I felt the best way to represent this would be to use the football side of his character to inspire the initial font choice and use his personality traits to manipulate it. 

I looked into Charlton football club- wanting to use their standard typeface as my font of choice, however, finding out what this was wasn't easy. First onto the Charlton Athletic website where I gathered examples of the text they used- on their shirts (from the time Luke was signed to them and present day), their stadium and their webpages. I couldn't pin what the exact font was, so after unsuccessfully scrolling through the font book, I had about 5 options of fonts that were similar, but not exact- just as backup if my other leads dried up.

Calibri Bold

Kozuka Gothic P6N

Abadi MT Condensed Extra Bold

Avenir Black

So how else to track down this mystery typeface? As I saw it, I had two options. The first of which involved Simon. He had spoken to us about a book he had ordered called 'Football Type' a collection of type and typography from football shirts and signs and clubs. He was able to provide me with the standard typeface used on the backs of football shirts but not the Charlton Athletic font (mainly due to how small Charlton is as a club, with Man U, AC Milan and Chelsea to compete with, Charlton didn't really have a chance). 

The second? Go to an outside source. I had read about the website whatthefont in 'Just My Type'- a website that could identify fonts and typefaces from images and logos. I entered my images and the site ran it's codes- the result? Well it kept insisting that my mystery font was Century Gothic, which I knew wasn't true, because on closer analysis it didn't match the examples I had (too thin and the Charlton font cut off it's c vertically). So I posted a personal appeal in the whatthefont forum and awaited an answer. Fortunately, this option paid off and I was rewarded with one simple comment, it said: 'Futura Condensed Bold'. A perfect match.

Futura Condensed Bold

I then went on to create a design board, extracting the essential bits of information from my previous research and placing them all together in one easy to reach place. All that was left to do now was to start sketching.