Choosing my font

We were given the option of choosing a font from 13 different designers. So before I begin designing I need to research the designers in order to pick one suited to me.

I started by heading online to find out more about the designers, quite a few were regular everyday designers that currently work in the industry, some, titans of the craft. So after spending quite some time looking through each designer I had narrowed it down to three. Paul Renner, Louise Fili and Adrian Frutiger.

I then started by sketching out some of the fonts that I found to be the most unique from the designers. This is what I came up with:

When illustrating each font I wanted to try capture its essence, if possible, in order to feel what they uniquely convey based on form and function. With this in mind I noted down some adjectives that I had associated with the fonts over this process to help generate ideas for the poster, themes and motifs that felt relevant to the typeface.

I decided to go with OCR-B. I felt it had a cool backstory that allowed me to play with the motivation behind its creation and even its function.

Inspiration

So I headed to Pinterest to gather the relevant inspiration. At this stage that is going to be super tech focused, with undertones of a bit of evil perhaps.

In my research i stumbled across one of my favourite movies. Ex_Machina. Linking this movie and OCR-B together I felt like I had hit on some good features to produce an idea from. I wanted to try and capture the link between man and machine, I felt this idea represented OCR-B perfectly as it was originally created to make machine language more readable to the human eye. From here I wanted to find imagery of things that are innately human blended with something distinctly machine.

I ended up finding these promotional posters for The Matrix which suited perfectly. They had taken something human and blended it with code. To me that perfectly represented OCR-B. So I began sketching.

Sketches