Here are some examples of letter faces made from clay and plasticine from our copy of The Making of Artistic Typefaces by 50 international designers published in 2016 by SendPoints Publishing in Hong Kong.
LudoSans is a handcrafted sans serif typeface by artist David Luepschen and designer Janina Sitzmann using Plasticine, wax, pigments, and a knife. Their purpose was to animate the typeface using a Strata-Cut method, a form of stop motion animation invented during the 1920s and 1930s by German animator Oskar Fischinger. You can view their animation here.
The San Diego Latino Film Festival Poster was created in clay by Mexican designer Rodrigo Zarain Rojas for the contest at the Media Arts Center of San Diego. He used white clay to model the icons and fonts, arranged them on a wooden surface, photographed the layout and imported it to Photoshop, and used a Wacom tablet to create the colors.
Using clay and sculpting tools, Barcelona-based designers Alex Palazzi, Eudald Carré, and Mio Ouchi created the Arial Family as an experimental series that investigates a relationship between typography and the human body. Changes in the font ‘weight’ are imagined as physical sizes of the human body, spelled out using an Arial font. Black, bold, regular and light variations are visualized with a realistic texture that mimics the skin, with wrinkles, folds, moles and bones intricately spelling out the typeface name.
Polish designer Justyna Rzepa created Zupa using Plasticine modeled into vegetables. The project was for a poster to encourage making and eating soups. Saturated colors were intended to bring to mind the deliciousness of fresh vegetables.
Awesome is also by Alex Palazzi. Letters were carved from a clay base, placed on a stand of thin dowels, then refined and smoothed, and finally covered in dripping slime.
View more designs from The Making of Artistic Typefaces.
View more Typography Tuesday posts.
