So as I mentioned before I had a different idea that I will be doing the whole alphabet, my idea basically is sign language. You may see that there is a pattern with braille and sign language but I feel that they both have not been done and are something a little different to work with and challenge myself with.

After doing some research I found that hands and typography were very limited and rather boring, I’m going to have the letter rather bold and a hand showing sign language which I hope to photograph someones hand whether its my own or a friends, who will be doing the letter in sign language and place it inside the letter. So for example have the letter A the a hand singing “A”, I found that I was looking at hands doing letter shapes like when I was a young adult doing the word LOVE with my hand and with my friends for shadows. This gave me an idea that the hand in the letter would look better drawn.

I think that taking the picture and then putting it in illustrator then trying to draw round the main areas of a hand would look better than a picture in the letter as it would fit in and not stand out as much as a picture.

I created a moodpboard of some pictures I found and got inspiration from,

(Please click on the picture to see bigger and clearly)

I felt that the font needed to be really bold, to the point it does not have any hole inside any letter such as “O”. This is so that the hand can fit in the letter and maybe even cover part of the letter but so you can still make out what letter it is. The picture in the bottom left corner with the hand and flour I really liked and may try taking a picture with a letter instead of the hand just to see what it looks like, I may not use it but just would like to experiment with flour to see how it looks.

I was looking on dafont.com for different styles and came across the font blackout sunrise I likes this font at first but found that when trying to place the hands on top of the letters they were to big for it and wanted a different and more bold font. I was looking online again and found Wagner Silhouette font, this font is perfect the letters are big and bold also don’t have any holes inside the letters which is a bonus. The best thing about the font is that the letters are not boring and have a little twist like the “C” looks a little like pacman so makes it that little bit more interesting.

In my workshop I had a little play around and came up with this;

this is only half done because I never managed to finish the rough in the workshop, but you can see I took some hand signals from a picture of google and just roughly cut around them and placed them on the letters. I done this to have a play about and see where they would look best on the letter, some things will need to changed like for example on the letter “Y” I got a paint brush and made it have an arm so that the hand fits at the top. Some other parts I had a move about with was the letter “V” i cut part of the hand of and like some others I placed it sideways so its not all the same and at the bottom.

Ive still got more to do yet but I’m more confident about this typography and am looking forward to the end result.