Drawing an alphabet – i

Initial idea: bitmap

Bitmaps or pixels suggest the early days of computers when screens (and printers) were such low resolution you could see the individual pixels that made up images and letters. However, the idea of making images from squares goes back to mosaics¹ rugs and cross-stitch samplers.

Basically, this is creating a letter by colouring in squares on graph paper. It’s slightly incongruous in that the letter has serifs² but this makes it a bit more 80s postmodern: anything goes. I originally tried to be more contradictory, making a curvy cartoon ‘i’ out of a grid of squares. I couldn’t get this to work.

Advantages of limitations

The limitations of being stuck to a grid make this a very quick and easy way to work, once you know what you’re doing. I used this method to come up with this logo.

Because of the limitations I could complete an alphabet based on this letter much more quickly than I could for any of the other letters in this collection. In fact I did create an entire font in about the same time as I spent failing to complete the ’s’.

Limitation is such an important thing in design but its difficult to commit to, if you have a choice. Who wants to have limits imposed?

This is part of a project to draw the letters of the alphabet in different styles.

Bonus feature

Letters into logos

It wasn’t the original intent but the potential was obviously there – I’ve turned some of the letters into logos and branding. I’ve had to invent companies to match the logos, which is not the usual order of things.

1. Though these, especially Roman and Greek ones, are usually made from squares tiles that are not laid in a rigid grid pattern.
2. The sticky out bits that are usually found on ‘old fashioned’ letters.