In class, we were able to meet with our sponsor to talk more about what the escape room is going to use our font for. He was really excited about the prospect of working with a unique student project for his escape room, which was so cool! He said that the escape room was timed, and participants had to escape before the Yeti caught up with them. The room would be designed like a rustic base camp, with a crudely built tent, fires, and furs. Our font would be used on the posters advertising the escape room, accompanied by the logo of the escape room.
After hearing about the escape room's concept, all of us students were able to share our preliminary fonts and the concepts behind the fonts. We then paired up based on the direction we wanted to take our fonts. Myself and Katie Vasconcelos paired up because we really wanted to start fresh based off of our sponsor's description of the escape room. We wanted to portray that rustic, Himalayan vibe in our font.
The process of creating the font was quite an adventure. We drew the letters out by hand and then scanned them into Adobe Illustrator. Once in vector format, we projected the letters up onto an overhead projector and perfected them to make sure they would look good from far away.
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| Slightly struggling |
We wrestled with Illustrator for quite a while, but we finally got all of our letters to look satisfactory, and we were both really pumped with how all of our logos came out!
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| Our alphabet! |
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| Banner format with the logo |
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| Landscape layout for flyers |
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| Portrait layout for flyers |
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| Layout without the Yeti logo |
We also composed an artist statement for our font:
"We designed our font, Rune, as a title font for a Yeti-expedition themed escape room. In designing this font, the goal was to entice WPI students to experience the “Revenge of the Yeti”. Some of the influence for the font came from the Nepali language. Each character in Nepalese has a straight line across the top, and each letter has both sharp corners and soft edges. Rune incorporates sharp lines and corners combined with slightly rounded edges and softer points. It resembles the jagged mountain tops, shown by the arms of the letters, the snow on the mountain, shown by rounded corners, and the harsh fangs of a yeti, shown by tooth-like serifs. The overall design of Rune, with its appearance of being carved into wood, resembles the final sign an explorer sees before ascending to the base camp of Mount Everest. Our font was originally hand drawn, much like a carved wooden sign, and then enhanced using Adobe Illustrator. The lines that compose each letter are slightly different, with serifs that are not the same size and downstrokes that are not completely straight to give the font a hand carved feeling. Rune serves to caution an explorer from imminent danger, while conveying the harsh cold and ancient surprises of the mountain."
Overall, this project was really awesome! It was challenging to develop a font from scratch, and I definitely have a newfound appreciation for font design. At the same time, it was an extremely rewarding and fun project. It's so awesome to be able to look at a fully formed logo that YOU created! I also was able to develop a much better understanding of how to use Adobe Illustrator, and I'm definitely looking forward to using it in the future, maybe to design posters for my own events!
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