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.