Laughing E
Basel Summer Workshop 2022
Type Design - Book Design
This typeface was designed during the Summer 2022 Basel Workshops at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland. Under the direction of Phillipp Stamm, participants were asked to choose a color and the letters of that color would be the letters we drew. Starting with my handwriting as inspiration I looked at how I naturally constructed my letters. My e is what struck me as the most unique and I wanted to incorporate the angled center line into my final version. The e was then used as the guide for the rest of the letters. And when a fellow workshop participant was looking at my work, they remarked on the fact that it looked like the e’s were laughing and that is where the name of the typeface originated. Throughout the week I continued to perfect the four letters that made up the word “green” and then used the elements to create an entire modular typeface alphabet.
Preliminary Sketches
The sketching process brought much trial and error. Allowing me to experimenting with letter width, height and styles. My final design consisted of very crisp and geometric letterforms.
Angles
The letter s was one of the final letters I created and I looked to the letter e for some guidance and inspiration. To tie the letters together I used the same angle for the crossbar in reverse directions. This allowed both letters to fit cohesively within the alphabet.
Modular Letters
Because of the geometric nature of the letterforms, it was very simple to create a good portion of the alphabet with just a few simple elements. Here you will see five modular elements that were flipped and rotated to create multiple letters. And the letters that I was not able to make with these shapes, were created using similar rules so the entire alphabet felt cohesive.
Weight Variation
Next we were tasked with designing variations of our typeface. I looked at weight variations and created a light line weight version of the word green. This came after experimenting with various widths on the letter n to see which version I would want to pursue. You can see those explorations here.
