Joo Ae Lee

When Professor Klein gave us a brief explanation of this project, I thought it would be a piece of cake because it was just simply tracing the letters and draw freehand. Therefore, I haven’t given much thought to pick the typeface. Since my name only contains five letters and my adjective ‘spiritual’ didn’t seem difficult to write, I thought I could write with any typefaces so I simply picked Baskerville. However, after I started to write these letters, I regret choosing it. If I get a chance to pick other typefaces, I would probably pick Helvetica.

Since Baskerville contains greater contrast between thick and thin, it wasn’t easy to just trace the letters. Even if I used tracing pads to trace, its thick and thin relationship made me hard to follow along the letters so I had to keep practice to figure out which part of the letters are thick and thin. My first name has two ‘O’s and drawing them was the hardest part out of all letters because its top and bottom were thinner than the sides. Not only the ‘O’ but lower case ‘a’ was tough to draw because of its bowl. I also never knew that the bracketed serif such as ‘t’ and ‘u’ would be this hard to follow along. Even though the brackets were clear and serifs were flat, I kept drawing outside of its shape. Therefore, I thought it might’ve been better to choose sans-serif typefaces.

The letter spaces and line spaces were also important in this project so I tried to give even spaces between letters and the leading but it was harder than I thought. The adjective ‘spiritual’ had nine letters and it was not easy to keep the same distance for each letters. Therefore, I traced them carefully so that I won’t make any mistakes by extending the exterior shape. This project was a challenging task for me because even if I pay attention to every detail of letters and practice with a lot of drafts, I still couldn’t get the perfect shape.