I remember the first time I was scrolling through Instagram and saw what the hashtag #36daysoftype consisted of. I was immediately awed by the myriad of creative ways artists interpret the latin alphabet by combining shapes, colors and movement. This motivated me to participate in 2023’s edition of the challenge, committing myself to a design a day for thirty six days. I aimed to illustrate each character with abstract, three-dimensional shapes that would ultimately take the desired form of the letter and number, while making it easy to distinguish.
As I began working on the initial designs, I decided that the "A" would act as the foundation in which I create the rest of the letters and numbers. I initially envisioned a black orb at the center of each character, which would represent their hearts. Its rings would act as the tools with which the heart forms their shape, either by making copies of themselves around it, or acting as part of the shape, like "M", "B" and "D". I also introduced new elements along the way, like the golden basin in characters such as "U" and "6".
I used Cinema 4D, Redshift and Photoshop for this project. Below is a time-lapse of me designing the letter "E". Although it takes the desired letterform from a frontal view, it is actually quite abstract from any other angle. It took quite a range of different tools such as Cloners, Boole, Bend Deformer and Twist Deformer, to name a few.
As I approached Day 15: Letter O, I wanted to try out a simple animation to bring one of these characters to life.
Note: On mobile, please double tap the image to open up the animation playback.
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Thanks for checking out my project. I hope you enjoyed looking at these as much as I enjoyed creating them!
On to the next one!
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