I had a notion that this looked a little ‘uncial’ but was quite encouraged by this – it would be interesting to see if this falls into line or whether I can corrupt and push it further.

Uncial scripts are are early Latin and Greek styles from the 3rd to 8th centuries and can be identified by their rounded structures and flowing strokes:

I put together a set of pieces culled from those initial figures:

With these I began to look for natural alignments and flow:

I composed a few more ‘characters’ and introduced a horizontal stroke. I say horizontal very loosely.

And went back to the first test character, making a number of variations on the theme:

After putting these characters together in different orders, I came across an awkward meeting that didn’t look calligraphic:

And created a more natural union that suggests a tight loop that might naturally occur in the flow of writing. This presented a new set of possibilities; characters with different terminals dependent upon, say their position in a word or line, as well as proximity to other specific characters. Hmm.

At this point I went into overdrive, trying lots of component parts and considering joins, combinations and ligatures. This is what my working file looked like:

and what I have produced so far is looking encouraging. The top shows the fine monoline, the middle a 10pt monoline and at the bottom the custom 20pt calligraphic stroke.

Ok. I have some basic structures. It’s really time to see what happens and where these may lead…

Last month I posted a teaser for an auction to raise funds for the final year exhibition of BA Graphics at the University of Lincoln. The auction – on EBay of course is now live and the bids have begun.

I only posted a small section of my offering in that post and promised to reveal all later, so here it is in full – click on it for a bigger view to see all the detail…

There’s also some interesting stuff from some big names too; this is your chance to own this original drawing, or any of the other other unique pieces (if you must!) as well as giving your direct support to these enthusiastic and hard-working students, so place your bids and keep watching…

Happy bidding!

Let me share my thinking and some of my process  with you. I have created several asemic writing systems before, each from very different starting points; the first was an automatic, handwritten script, developed over years of filling up pages in dull meetings:

This led to the development a set of  formalised glyphs, based upon a jaunty 45° angle directly lifted from the hand written script:

These two variants were the initial inspiration for the first book  ‘Four Fools’ and were used throughout:

As I was putting the finishing touches to Four Fools I decided to continue to develop the theme and aim for a series of four books. Not long after the first book was published and began to sell, I began to think about how the next book might work and I decoded to introduce some different writing systems, glyphs and symbols. Rather than begin on paper I set out exploring early ideas on screen. This one was inspired by old punched tickets:

Encouraged by this, I began exploring some more geometric, grid based linear forms that seemed to suggest a numbering or accounting system:

Whilst exploring the geometric grid ideas, I introduced a line weight difference favouring the horizontal strokes which led to this:

The gridded forms had worked well, but were visually repetitive, so I elected to take a less rigid approach. I still retained the geometric shapes, but began to formulate a ‘kit of parts’ approach that yielded something a little more natural that what I had produced previously:

I was pleased with this but also felt that it had some more to give. It was some time after whilst working on another project that I hit on the idea of converting this ultra geometric style to something that appeared to have some history. After failing to apply any convincing roman serifs, I tried the ‘old typewriter’ treatment, using some hi-res samples from a 1920 document and a huge amount of cut’n'paste, as well as too many hours of PhotoShop editing:

All of these were used in the second book ‘Pabulum’ along with the first two and a fair bit of brushwork.  This was even used the cover!

The next one was inspired by more Arabic structures and was originally a lot more complex than this – which was illegible at the sizes needed for book print, so this is a a highly simplified version that I think I will continue to develop at some point:

The more observant amongst you may have spotted that this also occasionally appears in the blog header…

Whilst I am very pleased with Pabulum, I feel that the next one needs to be simpler, with fewer scripts, and explore some more formal compositions and approaches. I also want to focus on the flow and texture of a script rather than add more grid based glyphs.

This brings us up to date. I have decided to develop another script – to me meaning something derived from the hand written – so I started filling sketchbooks again but found myself struggling to move away from the style I used originally. In order to find new inspiration, I tried using different media. Whilst this gave me some interesting and ultimately useful results, I was still no further in establishing a starting point.

Over the Christmas period I had downloaded a number of iPad drawing apps, some free form and some grid-based and a rather basic calligraphic one called Sketji by Aerfish. This is a simple tool – imagine a large Chinese calligraphy brush loaded with black ink:

Well this works just like that. A fast movement creates a thick stroke and slowly create a thin one. Refreshingly, this is all it does; no unnecessary bells and whistles, in-app upgrades or special effects. It does allow you to save your images though and gives you the option of high or low resolution too! I absolutely love it! It is an excellent tool for my purposes and I have wasted no time putting it to good use:

These were placed into Adobe Illustrator and converted to paths using the livetrace tool:

I started by using these as templates to see what the raw lines would look like, and ended up just focusing on a line and ellipse. The grid was created at a slight angle – just 5° from vertical to prevent me from exaggerating further as I wanted something much more subtle than my original 45° script. I kept the ellipse at the angle I drew it:

Though I was happy with the angle I was concerned that the ellipse was too condensed and would be problematic at small sizes. With that in mind I placed a smaller ellipse inside aligned to one side to really force the issue. The positioning was arbitrary here – I just wanted to look at the proportions and be able to visually gauge when I thought that a balance had been achieved:

After a fair bit of nudging and tweaking, I thought that the bottom middle was looking somewhere comfortable for development. The next stage was to make a proto-glyph; something to push around further and try a few diversions…

These simple structures will allow me to consider a range of structural and compositional factors. They may or may not be recognisable by the end, but right now they are like single celled organisms emerging from the primordial soup with only the faint whiff of evolution in the air.

My first port of call is the quality of line, as previous experience has taught me that this can have a profound influence on everything that follows (the first script was originally developed as a monoline and worked well until the moment I changed the line weight and style – pretty much every glyph was manually then adjusted by hand!) The standard calligraphy brushes in Illustrator are useful to start with to check out variations in width and angle of stroke:

But is is when the options palette is employed that the style can be adjusted exactly to where you want it. These settings give me a semibold stroke, decent visual definition in the stresses, as well as a friendly, brush-line roundness to the terminal of the stroke:

Then I did a scaling test along with a narrower 10pt stroke. This showed some areas that will need attention, especially at the points of convergence where the curves meet the upright strokes, but I am getting a good feeling about this:

I’ll keep you posted…

Shameless plug time. Around this time of year, final year graphics undergraduates up and down the country are planning a big finish to their studies and to launch the beginning of a myriad of careers in the creative industries. One of the important things in this whole process is fundraising and this year, students from the University of Lincoln are auctioning a plethora – yes, a plethora – of original work on postcards by some of the biggest names in the business. Oh, and mine too!

I am especially proud to be asked to contribute by three of my ex-students; Natasha Nuttall, Danielle Cowell and James Robbins, all of whom have progressed well at Lincoln and are ready to make their names. Go check out their stuff!

Their end of course exhibition is called SHOW THIRTEEN and has this great portfolio website to accompany it. Some really fabulous work. Meanwhile, you can follow the progress of the auction here and on twitter.

So what did I produce?  Just a little sketch…

I’ll post a fuller image closer to the time as they are having a bit of a guessing game right now…

The date for the auction is  Sunday 12th May. Bidding will open on the 6th May and end from 6pm on the 12th.

Happy bidding!

This Is Blues Hip-Hop by Scarecrow
Evil and Crossroads by Scarecrow
Come On In by R.L. Burnside
Songs In A & E by Spiritualised
Introduce Yourself by Faith No More
White Blood Cells by The White Stripes
A Sufi And A Killer by Gonjasufi
The Mix-Up by The Beastie Boys
Is This It? by The Strokes
Batholith by Bardo Pond
Maxinquay by Tricky
A Meeting By The River by Ry Cooder and V.M.Bhatt

Just a little peek at something that will soon be completed…