Alphabet soup...

Following the summer alphabet brief, i have been given an extending brief to create 10 letter forms influenced by the word FLATTEN. I have started by looking at existing letter forms i have collected to inspire me.When i think of the word flatten, the immediate things that came to mind were embossing and debossing. From this i thought of different visuals that could communicate this.

Here's a collection of some letter forms all visually different from one another, showing a small fraction of the vast variety of type you can get.

I also had access to the work of others in my group when we all presented our individual alphabet sets, another means of inspiration and ideas.

 This is the brainstorm i drew up when i first recieved the word FLATTEN.There are also some examples of letters that i felt had some relevance to my chosen word.I looked at concertina and the use of shadow and directional lines.

When i think of the word flatten, as i said embossing and debossing were my first thoughts.I looked at letters that had a 3D effect to them, whether that made them appear debossed or embossed.I then tried to design letters based on this principle.I found it challenging to draw letters that looked debossed, so i tried thinking of a way of creating an illusion of flatness and de-bossment.

These are examples of the use of directional lines and shadow to create an illusion of de-bossment, the lines reach down to the bottom right, which i think gives the letterform a distant look.This set shows the 'shadow' around the letter getting flatter, but i don't think it's clear enough as to what my influence is.

I tried out several ways with the letter B in which i could portray the word FLATTEN, i did a few simple ideas just working with line, i think they worked well, with this idea i then played around with the stroke of the letter. So as the letter form got flatter so did the stroke. 

The slow graduation  of the letters getting flatter is obviously important,  i have tried to do this subtly as i felt it was more effective.

An example of the subtle graduation of flattening.

This is what my final solution will look like, this shows examples of the letterform alone and with the directional line shadow. You can also get an idea of the subtle flattening.

A more complete example of my set, details still need to be more defined.

The first letterform and underneath the flattest letterform.

I took one of my letter forms into photoshop to try out the embossment filter, i think it looks too digital and i didn't really feel that it worked as well visually as the hand rendered examples, it looked tacky.