Punctuation, Ligatures & Emojis

For our ‘Punctuation, Ligatures and Emoji’s’ brief we were to create and develop a new character for the typefaces in ‘The Vignelli Canon’ which represents the meaning, personality and vibe of a word or phrase of our choice in groups of four.

                                                       

Character development ideas

In our groups we were to create 100 design developments for the new character. Our group chose the acronym ‘CBA’ or ‘can’t be arsed’ as it’s frequently used in everyday speech as well as on social media such as ‘Twitter’ and ‘Whatsapp’. We used the typefaces ‘Helvetica’ and ‘Bodoni’ as ‘Helvetica’ is very simple and clean-cut sans serif font, while ‘Bodoni’ is a modern serif font with deep terminals and soft bowls which can represent the apathetic attitude meant by the acronym we have chosen. Through various developments, we came out with an idea inspired by the Helvetica’s ‘bowls’ e.g. from the letter ‘B’ and Bodoni’s terminal e.g. ‘a’. Our character was aimed to be functional and can be written quickly or lazily much especially for written communications as the character is replacing the acronym in the sentence; it’s also to make sure that by using the character the meaning of the phrase itself is being understood. In addition, the character is arguably abstract, but still legible in a way, as when rotated on certain angles all three letters can be seen and read.  

        

Character influenced by 'Helvetica'

Character influenced by 'Bodoni'

If I were to redevelop these characters further I would make sure to pick on one typeface only for the final ideas as using two distinctly different typefaces may have different traits and personalities that affects the connotation of our chosen acronym which can only confuse the audience and make the character unsuccessful.