Type Two

My promotional piece for my typeface, "Instinct", which is based on the novel, The Call of the Wild. The idea behind the promo piece is to have the letters gradually intermingling with the thickening "trees" at the right of the piece, to suggest that wild/instinct element. I kept the colors of the letters black and white to represent the duality of domestic vs. wild, but I put the trees in grayscale to suggest the in-between stages, the gray areas, where one wouldn't know the difference between civil and uncivil. And yeah.. enjoy!

Here's my new uppercase letters! I think they turned out pretty well. I also have my numbers and symbols here too. I love my numbers, but some of my symbols I was totally stuck on what to do so I probably didn't do the best job on them. I really like the look of the old style numbers so I chose to do them for this typeface (I feel like they fit the time period of the story more, too).

Here are some lowercase letters. Since my furry letters weren't as well-received as I hoped (I still think they're awesome ;D), I reworked my typeface design and decided to focus on the inside of the letters since the main conflict in The Call of the Wild is an internal one (domestic breeding vs. wild instinct). The pure white part of the letters is the safe domestic lifestyle Buck knew back in California. The scratchy black part is the encroaching wilderness and survival instinct that creeps into his civil perception of the world, which eventually conquers him wholly.

Here is what my letter pieces look like when they're assembled. I think I need to fix the width of some of my strokes on the bottom row of letters, for some reason they got kinda narrow. I'm also wondering if it is consistent enough..

Edit: I decided to fill in the letters anyway, so here's what they look like after that..

Here's some pieces of the letters that will, with any luck, make up the final typeface. I'm still feeling it out a bit, seeing what works and what doesn't. Is it still communicating this decay of civilized thought? I think with the fill it does, but I may still have to work on serifs. I did like the slab serifs I was working with before but I thought I'd try out these pointy ones, perhaps because I liked the idea of "baring teeth."

Here's a few sketches I've done to start the idea flow for the first project, creating a typeface based on a story. My story is The Call of the Wild, the main theme being the degradation of a domestic, civilized being into one of wild instinct, fighting to survive in a (quite literal) dog-eat-dog world. Some ideas I've been playing with include "civil" type (like an everyday serif) changing into hand-done, unruly design in the same letter form. Also, I've been thinking about whether to have a typical fill typeface or an outline typeface.. or a typeface caught in between. I almost feel this could take on a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde vibe..