MDDN413 Jwen's Personal Reflections

  Me in class today, photo courtesy of Bibi. I realise I squint a lot when I do my work. I should stop that habit. But I was just trying to see the overall image as a whole. I find that squinting helps. We did a lot of stuff in class today with chalk. It was pretty fun - but messy! First exercise:- Fold the A3 sheet in half, and draw the letterform without looking at the page while holding the chalk on the side (long edge). We had to do this 3 times. Here are my results...      You can see that the very first one is the more 'raw'. The 3D effect that came out unexpectedly was quite pleasing. We also did more drawings of our letterform with our eyes open. Here are some experiments with serifs and kinda-cursive forms. I kinda like this one cause it has a gentle flow to it. Am also loving how one edge has a stronger accent compared to the other. Texture is <3   1 Sans Serif and 3 Serif Bs. I really like the last one because it looks almost perfect enough to pass...

Explored more sketches of B today during the Joseph Churchill lecture. I also wrote down a list of words starting with B in preparation for the zine ideas. Was thinking of starting each page with a word that started with B - such as black, bold, brave etc..   I referenced a lot of these letterforms from Google. Sorry Sarah & Walter, I didn't note down every exact link - but I definitely won't be using any of them for my zine! These sketches were just to get the juices flowing! Went home and played with the graph papers. Here's the culmination of my explorations on graph paper for the zine. I particularly like this mozaic-style graph paper because it forced me to implement more organic shapes while sketching out more letterforms.  Here's more. I tried to do 3D, soundwaves, playing with the width of bowls, putting smaller Bs within bigger Bs, outlines and more :) I liked how this page turned out. I also liked how this page turned out but it's definitely more organ...

Sarah showed us a really interesting video today. I absolutely loved it because it talked about 8-bit fonts, which was really intriguing because I love playing 8-bit games.  One of the comments said that it's amazing how constraints are sometimes the fuel for the most interesting creativity. Which I totally agree with, but it's also hard when you feel like you can't think of anything else!  Anyway, on to the workshop exercises.  For the first exercise... We had to fill in squares in an 8x8 grid and construct 2 variations: a version that is representative and a version that is abstract. Here are the initial results... The ones on the upper right (looks like an alien glyph) and bottom right (staircases!) are where I've tried to be more abstract. I must confess I do find it hard to visualise abstract images. You can see where I've tried to add serifs to the 'B' on the bottom left. Realised that adding and subtracting squares makes some slight but noticeable cha...

Today, we did the Black Square Exercise in class. I found out that we were supposed to use exactly 4 squares to compose our letterform - no more, no less. However, we can 'cheat' by hiding small squares within any of the black squares. We were given 10 minutes to compose our letterform, finalise it (by cutting off any overlapping edges and gluing them down to the paper) and then the option to present it to the class. This happened 3 times.  Here are my results with the letterform 'B'. This time, I scanned them with the TinyScanner app. For the first few tries, I just started playing around with the shapes.    Experimenting with the different sizes of counters . However, I felt like I was too rigid with this composition. So I made...     Something a little more varied, but to me, this looks more like an 'R' because I didn't have any leading lines to complete the bowl at the baseline.  I managed to make a B that looks like it could be part of a proper fo...