Rob Lycett Creative Suite 4: Helvetica Deconstruction

Helvetica Deconstruction

Today's workshop with Rob Lycett will require us to work in small production groups of 3 or 4 for the duration of the workshop. During a seminar prior, we were tasked with deconstructing a variety of letters printed in the font Helvetica. The Helvetica deconstruction was a rather interesting seminar task and in result I created a font that I then later named 'Overdrive'. Overdrive was inspired by a combination of Cyberpunk and glitch aesthetic and the creation of the font resulted tearing the Helvetica font to pieces because the only letters provided were 'HAND GLOVES'. It was an amalgamation of various thickness and letters of the Helvetica font to form new letters such as 'V' and 'R'.The initial deconstruction was only half complete, however it was scanned and below is the deconstruction. I later recreated the whole deconstruction in my spare time and scanned it in. Whilst in our production groups we are collectively tasked with designing a publication on Adobe Indesign CC. The publication consisted of a front cover, 5 sample double page spreads and a spine. I myself was tasked to create the Front Cover, as a group myself and others decided to call the publication 'Collaborative Deconstruction' and bellow is what i designed for the front cover.

Here is the initial deconstruction created in the seminar prior.

This is the recreated overdrive font that was created out of studio.

 With the use of Adobe Illustrator I first created the word collaborative, the method used to create this was to first individually type and outline each letter, although this was a lengthy time consuming part of the process. Then using the knife tool I slashed the letters up in various directions to create a cluster of shapes for each letter. all that remains in this method was to ungroup each letter and use the selection tool to pull apart the cut up letters. The end product of 'Collaborative' is as shown above, a few shapes had been deleted to give a more distorted/deconstructed image. 

Also using Adobe Illustrator I created the word deconstruction, this was a much more time consuming method because there wasn't a specific method, it was a lot of playing around with various shapes, lines and the use of contrast. The style was in fact inspired by a website that intentionally generates glitched text. The site is called Zalgo Text Generator  below is a screen capture of the site.