Tuesday 11 December 2012

OUGD404: Design Principles - Creating Accents With Type

For this part of the module, we were asked to modify the question, "Who Are You?" by manipulating letter forms to convey the feeling of an accent, this could be done by changing the weight, point size and fonts within the typeface. This would exaggerate the prominence of the pronunciation of the letters, which would convey the feeling of an accent. We were asked to create the following accents.

  • Geordie 
  •  Welsh 
  •  Yorkshire  
  •  Irish  
  •  Pirate 
  •  Essex 
  •  Scouse 
  • Jamaican 
  •  Russian 
  •  French 
  •  Australian 
You can see the results of my work in this issuu publication:




In Session:

In the session, we were placed into groups of 3 or 4. We were then asked to switch tables, giving us the "Who are you?"'s of another group. These were not labeled, so we could not tell which sentence belonged to which accent. We were then asked to categorise the sentences into their appropriate accent piles. This was rather difficult at times, sometimes we had issues differentiating Welsh and Irish typefaces, as they both follow a traditional celtic-style. Other fonts which we struggled to differentiate were English dialects, such as Scouse (The Liverpool accent), Geordie (The Newcastle-area accent) and the Yorkshire accent. All three of these accents are from the north of England. Some sounds are the same, and there aren't many distinguishable fonts which personify the accents correctly. 


We then selected the 4 accent groups which we believed to be the most accurate, and we then switched back to our original tables. As you can see above we were greeted with the following groups, Irish, Pirate, French and Russian. We then sorted through the piles, to find which of the fonts they sorted correctly. There were a few which were in the incorrect piles, however, the ones which were in the correct piles were fonts which personified the Pirate accent, and the Russian accent. The Pirate accent fonts usually looked distressed and had very worn, sharp characteristics, and the Russian accent was very bold, strong blocky, sometimes containing backwards letters, and new characters from the Russian language, these made the fonts very easy to distinguish. However, these stereotypes are rather outdated, the Russian fonts are based upon themes from the cold war, Russia being a powerful race with a feared arms-race, however Russia isn't like that in the present, 2012. The same applies to Pirates, we see them on ships, like something from the Disney film, Pirates of Caribbean, however, they're no longer like that, they use speed-boats, and can be quite modern, rather than scrawling quill onto paper. 

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