Thursday, June 25, 2009

My first attempt at typographic art



I found this picture while looking through a graphic design pdf file put together by Tanya Rubbak, whose art was recently featured in an article on Juxtapoz.com. Although it's not the best resolution, it struck me as something that might be interesting to mess around with.



To start out, I traced the letter in Illustrator. After experimenting with different Pathfinder tools, I ended up with the vector art on the right. As the stripes are slightly different on each side in the original design, I made them different colors so that I could easily edit the areas seperately in Photoshop.



After placing the vector file into Photoshop, I set each color to be its own seperate layer. Then, after I placed the pictures, I used the vector shapes to mask the appropriate areas of the photographs. After several masked layers, it finally started to look like the original photo.

Unfortunately, I made one grave error (oh no!). As I started working on top of the original, less-than-stellar-resolution photograph, I realized that I had forgotten to change the size of the canvas when I first started, and thus, the resolution on the final version is barely passable. Definitely something I'll have to watch out for in future projects.

6 comments:

  1. Dustin,

    Good job on the copy interpretation! I would have only done the letter in Illustrator and then just stuck with masks in Photoshop instead of messing with Pathfinder in Illustrator. Yes, definitely watch the Photoshop resolution! Don't ever let yourself do anything under 300dpi. You want to be able to print and show all of your stuff eventually, even if it is just a study. How closely would you follow this technique for your original interpretation?

    --David

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  2. I'm not quite sure yet, I figure it will take a little experimentation once I start it. One thing I don't particularly care for in the original is how busy it is, not only in the letters themselves, but in the overall composition, and how that basically destroys all legibility. What I'd like to do is take a word or phrase and mess with it using some of the same multiple-layer techniques, but make it so that it's still readable.

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  3. Great! I hope to see it as it progresses this week in your posts.

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  4. I think you did a great job at re-creating the letter - it looks the exact font and style. Since there is a lot of positive/negative spaces interacting maybe you could play more with the line direction and blending. I like how it's making type out of art - it doesn't really matter to me if it's legible or not - i guess it depends on if it is going to be made for commercial purposes or art purposes.

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