I've been following Type Fight for years. I first found out about the competition as an young graphic design student in Abilene, Texas. Five years later, I am a contender! I'm up against the very talented Mercè Núñez. Hoping for a nice, clean fight :D
Type Fight was a powerful and inspirational site for us as students because it forced the designers & letterers to work with incredible boundaries and restraints – 1000x1000, cannot collaborate, not too illustrative, no physical objects, but no color or style limitation. These parameters are generally quite different from an actual clients request where there very well might be no size or medium limitation, but a specific color palette or aesthetic may be required. Overall, these were exciting (and educational!) projects to analyze and critique as a student. Why would the hardly recognizable blackletter 'a' get 70% of the vote over a clean, beautifully drawn script? The more fights you see the easier it becomes to predict trends or winners, but its still good fun and a nice break from student work.
All that to say, I’m super excited and honored to have been asked to participate. Thanks Drew and Bryan and great fight Mercè!
I wanted to share a bit of the process behind my submission. So, I posted up a new screen shots below. The first being the initial drawing of the skeleton of my submission. I started by drawing the inner-most and outer-most shapes, then 'interpolated' them (or algorithmically blended with specific software tools created by type designers), I was left with these 5 instances in-between the two poles. Secondly, I interpolated even more instances to create the next drawing. Since these lines were even closer to each other it created a nearly chrome-like effect. Because of this, I nearly submitted it as my entry into Type Fight as is. After these two sketches, I began to construct the final design. I used the first drawing as the wireframe of the 'neon lights' and the second drawing was used as the 'backing' of the 3-dimensional signage. I then started adding color, shadows, and texture. The third shot appeared somewhere in that process and at the time I thought it was freakin' awesome. Which it is obviously not lol. I continued to work on the piece and even toyed with the idea of a bitmap, pixilated iteration (shot #4) but in the end I tossed up a new color scheme, added a bit of texture for shadows, some detail here and there, and shot it over to the fine folks at Type Fight.
Hope that was fun, informative or at least interesting. Peace! JB