Type and Tape

So far today has been really cool. Sally gave us the brief to create our own type design and stick it up around the uni using different colour/thickness of tape. Our group decided to sit down and try and decide what sort of type we wanted to use, what colour and thickness to do it in, and where we wanted to stick it. Everyone came up with some cool ideas from sticking three coloured tapes together and making our own version of script, to cutting stencils of letters from a chunk of tape and sticking it to different colour backgrounds like brick and steel. We ended up going with a form of type that I actually created myself years ago and always mess around with in my sketch book and doodling. Its basically creating letters out of boxes to spell out loads of words. We thought that everyone would probably make one massive word in one location, so to be more original we decided to make smaller simpler words, and put them in loads of different places all around thee uni. Like little typography Banksy's. We also thought it would be cool to "label" things. So we literally wrote "bench" on a bench, "lunch" on the cantine, "bin" on the bin in the studio and so on. We got some really good reactions to them as well when putting them up, so people obviously really liked them. So far we have done the words; lunch, bench, wall, door, bin, ceiling, grass, stairs, gallery, man hole and window.

So far so good.

This was the initial ideas that Ed came up with by going with the theme of a "child like" idea. However we found that the script style we were coming up with would be too difficult to create using three different coloured tapes.

This is the very best version of the initial idea of type, and even though it did work, it didn't look the way we thought it would, so we scraped the idea.

This is the next idea we had of creating stencils where we cut the letters out of the black tape background, we then thought it would look cool sticking these words on different backgrounds like brick walls and so on.

However we found that once we cut out the words and then stuck them to a background, with the weather conditions we found that the tape was getting all bunched up and not sticking to the walls, therefore we had to scrap that idea as well.

This is the third idea, and third time lucky. This is a form of type which I create a long time ago when doodling on paper, and therefore we put it to good use. This is a form of type using block capitals, and using actual blocks as the characters. They are literally block squares with small lines inside of the text to make the box look like a type character. I think it looks really cool.

We ended up thinking about where we wanted to stick these words we were coming up with and instead of creating one single massive word somewhere in the university, we decided to create smaller words and literally label the uni. In this example we labelled the door...

bin...

the bench outside...

man hole...

the vis com windows...

the metal staircase...

the cafe, but we mixed it up a little by writing the word "lunch" instead, and writing it backwards so the people could see what it said in the window.

We also wrote the word grass, on the grass...

we also labelled Jo and Matt so we didn't forget their names...

the gallery, and then we saw the CCTV sign...

the char in the studio...

the table...

and finally the ceiling...

I think this picture ^^^ has to be picture of the day since poor Matt worked his arse off trying to stick loads of little bits of tape onto the ceiling whilst standing on a table.