Practical - Type

Following my research into ready meals, I wanted to experiment with hand-drawn type. This style of type lends a homemade aesthetic to a design which is an element of the USP of my meals I wanted to highlight and draw upon within my designs.

I began to experiment by using brushes and ink. I began to hand paint the letters of the meals lower case. This was hard to do as I have little experience with hand lettering and my hands were also shaky. It was also difficult to keep the lettering consistent, with letters being of varying thickness. 

I instead began to paint in capital letters. This was far easier as the letters are more standardised. The slight shakiness in my hand added more to the home-made aesthetic I was looking for in using this style of type.

I continued on this hand lettering technique across all letters for the meals I needed. I also included an ampersand and '+' sign to see which would work better in context. The ampersands didn't look as clean as the '+' signs so I decided to use these instead.

After live tracing the letters, as well as painstakingly grouping each letter together from the live trace, I managed to assemble the first example of the hand lettering in place.

Above shows the hand-drawn type in place on the sleeve sections. The contrast of styles between the roughness of the type and the block of colour in the background works well - I need to still try and incorporate the swashes created earlier with the new type to see if the overall design works, or whether I should just keep one rougher element and contrast with the rest being a clean design.

For the rest of the type, I scanned in the other meal names and followed the same process of live tracing and creating shapes from the letters. To standardize the type, the letters that were already included in the first example of the type were copied across to the other meals where applicable. This standardises the type across the whole range and ensures consistency. On reflection, I could have created an entire alphabet which would mean I could extend the range of meals, but these were the only letters needed thus far.

Above shows the type in place across all the initial designs. I think the type works really well to portray the handmade feel I was aiming for, which conveys the USP behind my meal range really easily. 

As the type is rough around the edges due to the method of scanning in, I was worried that the type would look too rough around the edges so I printed a test sheet. Luckily the type looked clean enough in this scale on paper as opposed to a screen - and I really like the result. I think it looks legible and clean enough to present and the capitalisation of the letters makes the title pop. 

How I will develop:

Incorporate the hand-drawn type with earlier watercolour swatches.