This was a mockup of a weather app made in Illustrator for my Typography I class. I thought it would be really interesting to have an app that’s a little sarcastic and simple to read, with colors and phrases that made it really easy to understand what was going on outside. If the app were real, it would be interesting to change the phrases in order to match the local dialect and opinions surrounding any particular climate. I really like the dynamic placement of the text in the main temperature display, and I think I did pretty well with the icons!

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These are some mockups for a made-up design agency named Kotoba, made for a final in my Illustrator Certification class. I thought it was interesting that we were told to do some branding rather than simply take the test for our certification – but it was a really good exercise in solving problems visually and making recognizable logos and wordmarks. I think I did pretty well here considering I was a freshman at the time, and I’m a really big fan of the K-Pen and KO! marks. In retrospect, I think that the “Connected” logo would work way better for some sort of power tool company.

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This zine was a final for my Print Design and Production class. I decided to make my second zine about things that I had figured out over the last semester, and would like to share with others. I tried to adhere to the grid I had set up, and decided to go with stickers to display my information on the page alongside handwritten blurbs to add extra information. I think it turned out really well, but I wish I had more time to add some more information in the section about Obsidian. It’s a really good tool!

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For Typography II, we had to come up with hand-lettered phrases to put on T-shirts. I instantly gravitated towards making up some bad band names and throwing them on shirts. I immediately got to work and started sketching some ideas:

I picked the best sketches of the three and cleaned them up, and threw them onto T-shirt mockups.

I even ended up screenprinting the “CRISP RATT” design onto an actual T-shirt, and a ton of people wanted them! I ended up printing around 20 of them, so that design was a hit. I also thought the “Gallium” design ended up looking like the Gorrilaz logo as well, and I printed a few of those as well!

I got a ton of practice on working with hand lettering and making some cool band logos and I think I did really, really well with this one!

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This is a tri-fold brochure made about one of my favorite designers, Aaron Draplin, for my Typography 1 class. I decided to pull from the design of Field Notes, one of Aaron’s creations. I also thought about how often, a trifold brochure is often something that is thrown away. You read it, and discard it, and the format allows for that. But, what if the trifold had something for you to keep? I added the triple fold pocket ruler to the bottom so you have something that’s actually useful in a pinch, and you’ll always have something to remember the brochure by. It also brings in a bit of Aaron’s aesthetic too! I thought it turned out great.

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This was a book cover made for my Print Design and Production class of one of my favorite books – A Japanese novel titled Kafka on the Shore, written by Haruki Murakami. I chose the image of a crow because the main character identifies himself as Crow, and that theme stretches throughout the book. The use of blue was also chosen as it evoked the ocean, another important symbol.

Many other book covers for Kafka on the Shore have really unusual or odd imagery – Probably because Kafka is a weird book – and I think that a more simplified version would bring in more people to it’s story. Other versions of the cover took the same approach as me, but they all looked a little plain. I think that I made it seem a little more interesting than the other ones.

Something I would love to add to it would be an obi, or belt, which is often included on Japanese book releases to add things like marketing claims. On one of my books, Designing Design by Kenya Hara, it has it’s own obi with the title and some accolades for the book, and it adds a really interesting tactile feel and makes it seem a little more premium.

I haven’t had the chance to design very many book covers, so this gave me a lot of insight as to what goes into it, and I think that it turned out really well for one of my first attempts at something like this.

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Double Take

Double Take was a zine made for my Typography I final, and the first zine I have ever made. It is a collection of things you overhear that make you stop what you’re doing and do a double take, as I had been hearing a lot of those sorts of things over the last week, and continued to hear them as I wrote the zine.

Some of the imagery was taken from found items, such as the bottom of an Apple Magic Mouse on page 6, and the small notebook on pages 9 and 10. Many of the others were manipulated somehow, and I fell in love with Lindenwood University’s high-quality scanners, so I used those as much as I could. I learned a lot about page layout, what works, and what doesn’t. The copy on pages 7 and 8 are not my best work, but I’m pretty proud of the introduction pages.

The cover was adorned with handwritten variations of “WITH SPECIAL ISSUE”, and the last page before the rear cover contained handwritten citations for my images, as well as a small illustration and serial number to make each copy unique.

SPECIAL ISSUE

As I was looking for a quote to use for my final spread on or around December 6, 2023, Lindenwood University decided to cut many of its NCAA Division I sports teams, affecting 284 student athletes. This announcement caused a wave of anger throughout the student body, and came at a total surprise to everyone. The announcement itself made everyone do a double take, as the announcement given in the Lindenwood Theater lasted no longer than three minutes. The president wasn’t even present during the announcement, which made the entire situation seem callous.

“SPECIAL ISSUE” was a letter size sheet of paper folded in half and included in every physical copy of Double Take, finished just hours after the announcement. It reflected my frustration on that day, with the sports cuts and rising tuition making me feel like the student body was being exploited. It focused on showing the dissonance between the luxury contained in the president’s mansion (which had been the target of vandalism that night) and the University’s apparent need for money in an absurd way. I thought it fit well within the context of my zine, and within the broader history of zines as a medium for protest.

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This typeface was made for Typography II, where we were told to make an inspired typeface. One of my favorite fonts ever is Grilli Type’s GT Sectra. Sectra was made by taking a simple path for the letterform and processing it through the use of various tools, like drawing over that path with a broad-nibbed pen and then cutting it using an X-Acto knife.

Process

So, for Sclera (which is named after the white part of an eye), I decided to take a similar approach as Sectra and make something in a sort of blackletter style. I jumped into Krita and began to draw using a chisel-tip brush.

Then, I began to take that same brush and trace those letters using only straight lines:

With these, I was able to make very simple vector paths that could be brought into Illustrator to be stroked with a similar brush. A lot of the angles had to be changed to accommodate the angle of the brush, or else many of the lines would disappear. This also gave the typeface a good visual rhythm, where many diagonal lines were made at the same angle. However, since they’re just simple strokes, it would allow me to make the font bolder, lighter, or change the style quite easily.

I think this one turned out well for an inspired typeface, and I really enjoyed the process that GT Sectra used. I definitely would like to extend this to the lowercase characters as well, and add more symbols. My other typeface Hello World looked so much better after I added the lowercase set. I love how moody it is, and I could see it on the cover of a horror book or something like that!

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This is the first (real) font I’ve ever made, for my Typography I class. We were told to make a modular typeface, starting with the letters A, E, N, G, S, and 2. At first, I interpreted the assignment to be a whole lot more as it was, and started to sketch out letters that looked like this:

I really wanted to focus on the module on the left, and I thought it would end up being a really good looking sans-serif typeface. But, unfortunately, the reality of the time constraint got to me, and I decided to pivot to something simpler. I definitely want to continue with this someday when I have more time!

Moving to pixels

In order to make a typeface a little quicker, I decided to make a condensed sans-serif pixel typeface on a 4×10 grid. I’ve always thought that bitmap fonts like Mojangles and GNU Unifont had a really neat charm to them that reminds me of when computers were still in their infancy. When I first started using computers, sometimes I would open up Microsoft Word and check out which fonts were still legible at the smallest sizes, so I wanted to make something that accomplished that as well as having the charm of early computing.

I first began with the A, E, N, G, S, and 2, using a template I made previously in Affinity Designer.

From these letters, I was able to take out small modules and use them with other characters. For example, the E can be turned into a bunch of different letters, like F, O, C, J, B , and R. I was able to do that with all of these letters, building out the full uppercase set and the numbers.

I wasn’t able to fully conform to my 4 x 10 grid, sometimes extending it to 5 x 10 for M, W, V, X, Y, and 6. At 4 x 10, M, W, and V were illegible, and X and Y were difficult to look at. The 6 required a more rounded bottom to help more easily distinguish it from the 8.

The lowercase symbols went through a similar process, with making the base letters and extrapolating their features to the others. The symbols were pretty challenging and I had to throw the 4 x 10 grid out of the window for most characters, but I had a lot of fun making them. Below are my two favorite characters in the whole set.

After I was all finished, I threw all my exported SVG files into FontForge and adjusted the kerning. I didn’t add hinting like many other fonts have, because I noticed that the typeface looked blurry when scaled down to miniscule sizes. On a screen, it looks like the absolute minimum that Hello World can be scaled to is 8pt without any blending of strokes. Any smaller, and the lines of characters like W and M tend to start blending together.

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