Don’t write so that you can be understood, write so that you can’t be misunderstood.
William Howard Taft
Choosing my first initial, E, I decided to convey the idea of separation. Sometimes we have to separate ourselves from our everyday lives to evaluate and understand oneself as a person. To illustrate this in my design, I had little to no shapes touching each other as I felt like a sense of unity could be still accomplished without a single fluid shape.
Researching specific examples of manuscript text, it was brought to my attention the amount of detail that was placed into each letter. The variation in brush work directly impacted the outcome of a character’ appearance. When compared, one can tell the difference between a soft touch and a heavy hand depending on the stroke weight of a letter and/or how it ended. The same concept can be applied to digital means. If one was to replicate a serif typeface by hand with ink, this is a very high chance that the individual would write softly and quickly to avoid the ink from spreading too much. On the other hand, a sans serif would take more time as more pressure would be needed to maintain equal line thickness. This is why in my illustration; my lines were both thick and thin in certain areas as I wanted to incorporate both.
After completion, it is very clear to see that the practice of developing manuscripts in itself is an art. It was also interesting to learn how it all connects to modern graphic design work. Although art can now be done digitally, the thought process is the same as one must treat a letter as not just a character, but as a symbol.