14. The First Thing Ident

In his last post, Craig Osgood created his own hand-made font on an iPad to use as a header for his baking blog. This made me think that we needed some kind of possible header or logo for our blog, The First Thing.

Inspiration

I briefly thought about creating a font of my own for this project, but because of having made a complete working font in the past, I knew that it could potentially end up taking a very long time to do so. My font is called eerie. I created it as part of my coursework for my HNC in Graphic Design from North Oxfordshire College in Banbury. Each letter was hand-drawn, scanned and then turned into individual vectors using Photoshop and Fontographer. If you would like to be able to use my eerie font on your computer, just let me know by posting a comment in this blog and I will be happy to send you a free copy.

Rather than create my own font this time though, I decided to do a little browsing with the help of Google Image search to see what I could stumble upon for typographic inspiration. In my student days this sort of research would have required a trip to the library or the newsagents to browse through various printed publications. The internet of course puts an inconceivable mountain-full of inspiration within the reach of a few clicks.

Construction

I knew right from the start that I was interested in making a typographic piece that would involve animation, something along the lines of the kind of thing that you see for the television network idents.  So, not only would Craig and I have our own blog, but now it would be growing into having a look, a logo and even a television station all of it's own. Imagine that, eh?

After collecting the individual images in a variety of styles of the letters that I needed, I was then ready to assemble and orchestrate the pieces together to create our title. I did this using a program called Motion which is made by Apple. Motion is unbelievably inexpensive for what it is in case anyone out there is interested in dabbling in this sort of work on a computer. It may look a bit complex and intimidating at first sight, but Motion is actually not so difficult once you break it down to understanding what the individual parts of the interface do and can focus on just looking at what you need for your task at hand. If you take the time to explore in Motion you'll find an incredible amount of power to create all manner of special effects and movements that you might want for a video project.

So here is my creation in response to Craig's last post. It's the first of what could conceivably become a series of motion graphics idents for The First Thing, which could of course also be used as intro pieces should we wish to make any video blog posts or that sort of thing in the future. Hopefully those ideas will spark even more ideas to come from Craig and myself as we continue our pass-the-baton game of blog posts.

13. ABC

Well after seeing Rex's last post, I really wanted to make Rex's digital design into a real life box (but thats for another day). 

What really caught my eye was the fonts that Rex had created by hand. I've always had a interest in typography and its amazing how many fonts are widely available online.


Creating my Own Font

As soon as I saw Rex's design I knew I had to attempt to make my own font. I'd never really thought about what sort of work went into creating a font. But after having a quick browse around the web I found a couple of options, which varied from a £800 bit of software, a website or a iPad application.

so I happily chose the £4.99 iPad application, which is called iFontmaker. The way the app works is quite simple you work your way through the alphabet drawing out your letters with a stylus.

Once you have finished designing your fonts you hit export and voila you have a font! Which is ready to use in any application from Word to Photoshop.

So after creating my font I needed to test it out. I'm currently planning a baking blog so created a little header to see what my font looked like.

12. Craig's Moon Pies

I have never eaten a Moon Pie, although the name is familiar to me. Additionally, I only just saw this old Moon Pie logo for the first time today after already finishing my own creation. I quite like that I didn't see their logo first, but I also quite like the similarities between them. My first impression of Craig's Moon Pie's was that they looked beautiful, yummy and were glowing with the love and tastiness that only homemade treats can have. The obvious quality of these creations needed somehow to be promoted to the world at large.

Snack Cakes

As a child, two of my favourite snack cakes were made by a company called Hostess. Fluffy, yellow ones called Twinkies and fluffy, chocolaty ones called Ding Dongs. They also had another amusingly named creation called Ho Ho's. I tend to not eat highly processed and packaged things like that anymore as an adult and my waistline is much the better because of it. I am however tempted by the look of Craig's homemade Moon Cakes, which I thought deserved an equally homemade and hand-crafted logo which could be used for advertising and packaging of these lovely treats. It came as a surprising coincidence to me to find out today while preparing this post, that my beloved Hostess Twinkies are no longer made as the Hostess company recently went out of business. What an interesting irony to discover the replacement offering called Cloud Cakes that have been dreamed up by another famous company from my childhood, Little Debbie's. I see that Craig is going to have some tough international competition when it comes time to market his Moon Pies.

Sketchbook

Without much planning or knowing what I wanted to come up, with I just sat down on my train journey and made some rough sketches of ideas. I did have an image in my head of the man in the moon from the famous Lumiere Brothers film from 1902 called "A Trip to the Moon". I loved watching these kinds of old clips on the television as a kid which provided a time-travellers look at the past while at the same time showing a whimsical world of imagination. Within a single train journey I had come up with an idea that I thought would suffice for my final presentation of a whimsical world of wonderful tasty treats.

Photoshop and a Wacom Tablet

After many, many years of thinking "Wouldn't it be fun to have one of those tablets that let you draw and paint on the computer?", I finally bought one last year. It was really my daughter Tabitha's interest in getting one that helped encourage me to finally buy one and indeed it was really bought as her birthday present, although she and I both have always known that I wanted to use it as much as her. So here was a perfect opportunity for a bit of computer painting. I sat down with my electronic pen and proceeded to  recreate and embellish my original sketches. And here is the result.