I have just submitted the letter ‘T’ to Alphabattle.
This is a great opportunity for artists and designers and the odd silly art director to submit their versions of the alphabet.
It started in February 2010 and will finish in February 2011 with a new letter submitted every 2 weeks.
I have always had a love of type and type forms. It ‘s a unique way to combine words and pictures to create an original idea.
When I was at college I designed a typeface and named it ‘Blowfly Black’. It was used in the Swinburne yearbook and I also managed to have it released as a Mecanorma rub down type.
It took me months to design the letterforms and then illustrate each letter on art board, using a Rotring Rapidograph and compass.
When I was doing a fellowship in Manchester, the computer scientists felt that it would be a great exercise to try to use their computer to do all this hard work for me. Their computer was the size of a large truck and after 4 months they gave up – I think we had got to ‘C’.
When I first got involved with the Mac, a young designer showed me a program that could create a vector version of a typeface in a matter of seconds.
I wish I had had that in 1969.
