What the Font-4 Stars

A common exercise in design school, take typographical elements (perhaps even the words of a story) and bring them to life.

I remembered seeing typographic portraits done by people in my high school and always wondered how they did it. This assignment allowed me to gain the knowledge on how to do it.

The Work Itself

The Story Behind the Story

At Carova Beach in the Outer Banks, wild horses roam all over the place. It was to my delight that I was able to capture so many photos of these beautiful creatures because they would walk around and eat grass in the backyard of the beach house every day. We are not allowed to approach them, but I kept my distance and was able to get some amazing shots. Although there are many who follow this law there are many more who ignore it and feed these wild animals. As more and more people come to visit this beach, the horses become more and more reliant on humans. It is quite sad.

I chose this photo to turn into typography because I thought that the horses shape would be obvious once all of the details were gone.

Narrating the Process

For this assignment I used Photoshop Elements 11 and followed the step by step instructions of this extremely helpful video. I used the words “horses and beach” to create the image.

“A common exercise in design school, take typographical elements (perhaps even the words of a story) and bring them to life.”

For the “What The Font?” assignment I chose to make a pumpkin out of the phrase “HappyHalloween.” I decided to make a pumpkin for this assignment because Halloween is at the end of this month and I’m getting a costume this weekend for a party so it has been on my mind a lot lately.

The process to make the pumpkin started off with figuring out the design which involved a lot of trial and error. To start on the design process I first opened Microsoft Word and created a large text box to make editing the pumpkin a lot easier. I started off by spelling out the word “Boo” for the stem since the stem has to be kept skinny and “Boo” is a short word. At first I only used one “Boo” for the stem:

 But I later thought that two columns of “Boo” looked better: 

To make the rest of the pumpkin. I spelled out “HappyHalloween” until I thought it was enough. Starting off with only three “HappyHalloween”s and then gradually making the rows longer until I got to the base of the pumpkin where I gradually made the rows smaller, mirroring the top half to give it a circular shape:

I then started carving my pumpkin by deleting letters and spacing out sections to give the effect of eyes and did the same for the mouth of the pumpkin:

The next thing was to give my pumpkin a little bit of color so I highlighted the stem and clicked the Format tab at the top of the page and directly under “Format” I chose the “Gold Fill” WordArt style to color the stem. For the bulk of the pumpkin, I started off the same by highlighting it and clicking the Format tab. This time, I clicked the third option in the “WordArt Styles” section which gave it the orange color and style I chose. Lastly I decided to make some grass to give it a little bit of a setting to it. I did this by typing two lines of exclamation points and coloring them green in the same style that I used for the stem and bulk of the pumpkin.

Today’s assignment from DS106 is “What the font: take typographical elements (perhaps even the words of a story) and bring them to life.”

After reading a participant’s blog that she used imagechef for this assignment, I decided to give it a try. There were different shapes to chose from (butterfly, sun, raindrop…) When I saw the shape of an envelop, I immediately typed in the text box “All love letters are ridiculous”, which comes from a poem by Fernando Pessoa.

This is the result:

Using imagechef.com was pretty easy. If you are not satisfy with the way letters are arranged, you can hit the Rearrange button to try again. Lucky for me, I liked the first version.