Day #7: Steph

My thinking on this project is shifting after a week. I think that I came at it too strongly from the conceptual side of things when, in practice, it's a formal exercise. Ross's comment certainly called attention to this, and also my professor made a comment about the content being "esoteric." He's right, but I don't think that that has to be a bad thing. True, those people who know the names being represented can think about it in terms of the people themselves, but there's something to be said for just appreciating the formal beauty of the letters in relation to each other, their colour and their background.

· How does white on pink look different from white on green?

· How does the relationship between the "t" and the "e" change when the "e" is in front of or behind the "t"?

· Is there an optical difference in the letterspacing of light-coloured letters as opposed to dark-coloured letters? Is the difference real or imagined? 

And other such questions. 

What the names do for me, I think, is force me to problem-solve letter relationships that I would normall avoid when typesetting. While the names are chosen rather methodically they do, in a way, give me a random configuration of letters to relate to each other, which is interesting. For example, with "Steph" the relationship between the uppercase S and the lowercase t was a bit of a toughy which I hadn't encountered much as yet. The names become less important than their constituent parts in an exercise like this, and I think that if you went and looked at the pieces from the past week that will come through.