Development of Type and Final Design

For my final design I wanted to keep to the seaside theme that was seen in my scamps and first ideas, as I felt that this conveyed the theme of the book well. I started by gathering imagery of fishing nets and other objects associated with the sea. My initial idea was to have the letters as though they had been caught up in the net, however when I drew out the fishing net, I started looking at how the net was actually made. I drew a close up of the fishing net to show how the letters would be made and held together and also to show what techniques would be used; I layered pencil and then biro, I also experimented with adding water colour pencil over the top. Once I had the technique sorted I tried it out with the letter "A" and it worked well, I then tried it with an actual word. In this draft I kept each letter separate, however in the final design I changed this in order for it to flow better.

      Once I was happy with the way the type was looking I started playing with different objects and techniques. I thought these could be used to embellish the font and take the theme further. I wasn't sure at this stage whether I was going to keep the everything in biro and black and white, or whether to incorporate some colour, so I tried both. I also tried using graphite and adding more detail (shell drawing), however I decided that the graphite and that level of detail would get lost behind the typeface. 

When it came to creating my final design, I went about drawing the type in exactly the same way as I did in my development. I drew it out in pencil and went over it in biro. The layers of pencil under the biro meant that there was more of a gradual tone change, rather that just being reliant on directional line. 

      Once my actual type was drawn out, I began adding background elements to make the theme clearer. I added a life ring, which I think worked really well; as well as bringing in the seaside theme (it also shows life and death) it brought the two words together really well. The lantern hanging from the letters, represents the light in the dark that the miners provide and the hope that Cherry feels when she sees them; she is no longer alone. At this point the words were still just in biro, however I felt that this made the words and the objects look disconnected, so I went over the biro in a dark brown water colour pencil to bring the whole piece together. 

      I think the process worked well and the final design would work well as a title page for the short story. If I were to use this as the title, I would scan it into Photoshop so I could tweak colours and sizes.

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