Digital Image Editing (WK4) - Design Blog

I last posted about the typography on a band's merchandise that I saw over the weekend (I'll include another photo for reference), and I truly can't stop thinking about it. I understand the basics of typography and can (sometimes) figure out what would have looked better on a design that's already been created, but when it comes to my own work, I struggle immensely. Typography can have a significant impact on how a piece is perceived (as I experienced when deciding which t-shirt to purchase from the booth in my last Design Blog post). It's difficult to stray from what I personally prefer to choose something I may not like, but that works better for the piece and its message. 

I decided to attempt to redesign this same shirt, with minimal changes, just to see how it would look after changing the script-type font. 

The recreation isn't perfect, and I'm sure with more time, I could completely redesign it. For the sake of this post, I wanted to keep it as close to the original as possible, and I'm assuming there's a reason it was designed this way. I found a typeface that was pretty close to the original, except the e's aren't slanted. I removed "what separates me from you" entirely, because I felt it worked against the design and made the front of the shirt look cluttered. Instead of trying to find a font that coordinated with the original, I used an outline of the main font in a color that was grabbed from the shirt itself to give some variation and hierarchy. The downside of doing this is that it looked like a misprint when I overlapped the letters to mimic the original shirt. That being said, even though I'm sure there are better typography choices overall, I think my version looks more cohesive. 

This was challenging, but it helped me to practice alternatives to trying to combine multiple typeface families. Originally, I wanted to try to find a different script because I was basing my recreation on the original, but ultimately, I referenced information I've learned over the past few months and went with the "less is more" approach. I also learned how to use the "warp text" tool, and this mini-project allowed me to practice selecting areas and moving them to a new project, which is how I was able to move the original images from the shirt to my redesign.