ILLUSTRATOR BRIEF

Article used: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/nov/04/russian-avant-garde-constructivists

The constructivists and the Russian revolution in art and architecture by Owen Hatherley

Taking inspiration from the above article, it became a way of 'building' up each individual letter.

These were created simply by using an article on architecture to display the shape of a capital A. 

This idea has been applied to the illustrator brief by using the said article to form the alphabet. 

The article was layered on top of the alphabet and a clipping mask was used to form each of the letters. The font used was Headline. It gave a great shape and base to fill up with text. Something really bold was needed in order for the text inside of it to be legible, otherwise the pt of the article text would have been a bit ridiculous. Originally, a few attempts were done with other fonts. At first it wasn't apparent that a large, bold font was going to work best, as seen below. 

The font used in the above screenshots is Orator Std. The article text is also. It just didn't seem to be working, it didn't really have any relevance to the piece either, whereas Headline is well suited. 

Colour was used to highlight important words or phrases that became visible within each individual letter, giving a sense of what the article was about, and the main things involved. This seemed to be the best use of colour, as putting an outline on the letters reduced the amount of text inside each one a considerable amount. Originally, the colour was chosen to reflect the nature of the article. Red for Russia, the red wedge and so on.

It wasn't until it was all complete that a few problems cropped up (really annoying problems). 

- the article font had been left as Orator std. whilst the main typeface was headline

- whilst trying to scale it to fit A1, the colour kept going missing due to it being a clipping mask and not a whole image

- THE COLOUR IS NOT CMYK!!!!!!!!!

Change of plan. Had to start over.

Out of all the options, blue seemed to be the next most appropriate colour, reflecting sky, height and perhaps the idea of blueprints (possibly clutching at straws here).

Finally, all of the text was in Headline. The colour fit the brief.