Logo/New Blog Layout

Our latest project in Typography was to create a logo from 2 initials (these could be from our name, or not)  They were meant to say something about our personality, since it is a logo about ourself.
This is a good opportunity for me to describe the amount of process that goes into each of our projects.

First, we were given a set of letters that we traced with a broad, flat edged pen.  There were 4 sets of letters, Roman serif, italic serif, roman sans-serif, and italic sans serif.  We traced all 4 of these sets about 5 times with the flat edge pen, adjusting the angle of the pen each time to achieve a different result.

Next, we chose our best letter set, and traced that with a pencil, interpreting each rough letter with more precision, adjusting weights of the thicks and thins of each letter, as well as adding personality to them.

Then, we took these letters and started drawing logos with them.  Each one is about an inch big.  I made about 30.  For the next class, we needed to have our 5 best drawn and colored in on 5"x7" paper.  In class, we chose our best one, and worked on making it better, again adjusting thicks and thins, negative space, looking at the visual weight of each letter to make sure it wasn't to heavy.

We were to have two final versions of this logo painted for the next class, 5"x7".  They were both the same logo, one was just a variation of the other.  I sketched each one about 10-20 times before doing the final.  Here are the two I brought in to class:

This was the first one I did.

And this was the variation I made:

I liked the first one better, and thought it was more of a statement of me.

Some people agreed, but a lot of people preferred the second one, the teacher argued was more "me".

So I decided to use that for my final.  The final is at the next class, and we had to work on fixing it even further.  People said that the m isn't that  legible as an m, so I had to work on fixing that.  Again, I drew about 20 sketches of this until I got the right look.  And here it is:

7" x 5"

Black Gouache

I liked it and decided to add it into my blog design.  I needed a redesign anyway.  The old template I used wasted a lot of space on the left side of the page.  That meant that extra wide images had to be really small, or they would get cut off on the right.  this new template has a lot more usable space.

The logo at the top, I drew in illustrator from the hand drawn one.

To explain the new blog title:

I'm on a bit of a typography kick right now.  I have really been liking it and look forward to studying it a lot more in the future.  We have had to learn a lot of terms pertaining to typography and on of them was "em space" which originally referred to the width of the capitol M, the widest letter.  It is now just defined as a the width of a typeface, so for example, in a 12 pt font, the M would be 12 points wide.

So that's where I got the am_space name from.