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November 12, 2017

The Rune Font

Caroline and I decided to work together to hand-draw our font and scan it onto Adobe Illustrator. Neither of us had used the program before, so it was a bit difficult to navigate. We were inspired by the runes pictures we had Googled earlier. They reminded us of engraved cave drawings and trail signs.
Image result for wood trail signs
From: https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/5879/wood-versus-plastic-trail-signs

Hand drawing
We then scanned this font onto Adobe Illustrator to enhance some of the picture and improve the design.
This is the logo that was provided to us by the client. Upon looking at it, we saw a yeti emerging from a frozen cave outlined by ice or jagged rocks. The straight lines that compose our letters reflect the jagged cave the yeti is emerging from. The arms of some of the straighter letters, such as "H" and "Z" have bent lines composing them, signifying the mountain that the adventurers will be on and that the yeti lives on. All of our uppercase letters include bent serifs, further showing the jaggedness of the mountain and the tops of its peaks. The design gives the letters a more ancient feel, as if they were carved into the rock of the cave.

Final Font

Examples of Font Uses




Artist Statement

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.


Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 12, 2017 at 9:34 PM

    I'm definitely liking how the jagged nature of your font reflects the shape of the logo's edge. The use of diamond-like shapes also gives it a very distinctive appearance, and helps it to call to mind the image of mountain peaks. You also did a good job of drawing from and incorporating multiple different existing scripts while creating something that still feels rather distinct and new.

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  2. Ryan LaPointeNovember 13, 2017 at 2:42 AM

    I like the uniformity of your letters. Also, very impressive use of Illustrator for vectorizing your letters. I should try using it some time--I am impressed by the results that you were able to get.

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownNovember 13, 2017 at 3:55 AM

    I absolutely adore that final sample image! It was so creative to elaborate the serif(?) of the R to make it look like a mountain. It looks like a very real logo! I also really like how you stuck true to your theme of mimicking trail signs and the like. It defiantly looks like you have accomplished creating that association in the viewers mind that you had set out to make.

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownNovember 13, 2017 at 5:43 AM

    Hey cool font! I really like how we both had the same font, but we both posted different information about it. Even as co-authors, we have different perspectives on the fonts, and I think that speaks to how versatile our font is. It was such a pleasure working with you - the whole process was challenging yet fun!

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