Font BeTa

My first real font is almost ready.
I did say I'd do this at some point.

I named it Becoming Taskless after this blog, as the typeface is based on an illustrative style that I began to develop just a little before I started this blog.
Part of it was even in my old header:



You can see every single letter of the fully working font just below:

I still have a few more things to tweak before I put this font up for download, I've got many a punctuation symbol to illustrate before I'm completely happy
- perfectionism can be a curse at times.

I'd like to thank Kate who has helped me out and modeled for me here and several times before.

In my last portfolio review of the year, upon seeing this book, my tutor asked me what does the term 'Becoming Taskless' actually mean.
Which lead me to think, I haven't mentioned it here at all.

You've probably worked this out by now, but for me becoming taskless is the ultimate dream, once you've become taskless, you are completely happy, as you've finished all the tasks you've ever needed/wanted to do. You're at the point where you could actually say, ‘I can die now’ and mean it.

This blog is an account of me becoming taskless.

Vinyl Magnitude

I'm rarely one to backtrack, even though I said I would in my first ever post. Yeah sure I may show something that I did a couple of months ago, but at times there tends to be that point of no return. But this time I've dug deep - with no more work to do as the year is basically over, why not?

Now this is pretty damn old:

For a typography project during the first term, we had to create something that communicated the essential personality of an almost randomly selected typeface.



I ended up with Amplitude; a rather young font (about 6-7 years old as I recall), created by Christian Schwartz that currently has 35 different styles.

Upon further research I found that the typeface predicts the spread of ink on paper using Ink traps.

So I created a 'Vinyl Toy Prototype' for a toy collection based on the font's ink trapping capabilities. Part of my reason for designing a toy collection was to point out how young the font really is, and to highlight just how many different versions of the font there are! Surely if I had more than 3 days to do this I would have definitely attempted to create a fully painted, fully packaged whole series! Madness indeed.




They trap ink in their deep clefts.

How cute.

I must make more toys, solely to look at them.

Heroes of Fiction

Hey there, I present to you my last project of the academic year.

It was a rare occasion, as I went for a design brief.
We had to design a collection of books based on inspirational people of our choice.

I chose to design a series of book covers on the fictional spearheads of various bands:


Lumi from Genki Rockets,


The Duke from Marmaduke Duke,


& Murdoc from Gorillaz.

Why the masks? I played with the idea of people being so inspirational that other people would want to be them. I decided to take photos of "normal" people being their inspirational person. Also unintentionally I feel that the use of masks outline the fact that the characters aren't actually real. There's also a chance that I subconsciously came up with this idea because of my underlying obsession with masks... I'm not complaining though.

The main focus of each cover is the photograph, so I put the book title on an easily removable label. It'd be up to the book's owner to keep it on, I personally would keep it, but that's because I find it hard to let things go.

I know that by posting these next pictures I'm effectively showing you the same images 3 times, but I feel they need to be seen alone, in their striking form; with no distractions:







Man, photography is fun - next year I must be sure to do more of it.

Doing this project has made me appreciate and enjoy aspects of design a lot more than I used to. The idea of having to choose one pathway next year and go with it for the rest of my degree is a little scary, as I keep becoming unsure of my specialties.

As I've said at many times in general conversation I feel like a Jack of all trades,
but master of none.