Expressive Words

OVERVIEW

An expressive word is one that manipulates a word’s letterforms to communicate the meaning of the word. This project consisted of brainstorming word candidates to make into expressive words, creating basic sketches, then rendering a few selected ideas into more refined versions using Adobe Illustrator.

Why Expressive Words?

I used this as an opportunity to not only take advantage of my new tablet’s drawing capabilities, but as a way to familiarize myself with it in my quest for new and effective means of digital note keeping. (I’ve since purchased an Apple Pencil; I highly recommend the experience!)

Also, having recently taken a workshop on Adobe Illustrator, I wanted to put those skills to use.

Process

For this creative exercise, I challenged myself to come up with as many expressive word ideas—making a quick sketch for each—as I could in an hour. (Having to draw with my finger was, by far, the most time-consuming aspect of the exercise…) When I was done, I had 23 sketches… some ‘better’ than others, but definitely enough to work with to develop into more polished versions.

Here are sketches:

While definitely not an advanced Illustrator user, I did take advantage of what I’d learned to experiment with a variety of fonts; I opted to stick with a primarily black and white style, using color sparingly. Here are the final versions of some of the expressive words I created in Illustrator:

Takeaways

First of all, creating expressive words is a great way to get your creative juices flowing!

Also, having the right tools for your projects can make a big difference in the finish of your final product. During this project, I used Adobe Illustrator to take my ideas to the next level; it’s a powerful resource to have access to, as are things like tablets (and Procreate!) when it comes to digital ideation. Having such work saved to an easily accessible folder in the cloud is a game changer–it’s incredible to be able to look back on projects done months–or years–ago, ones you probably wouldn’t bother hunting down had you done it on paper. A lot of great material is just lying in wait!

Finally, building on this exercise, were I to do more expressive words in the future, I would likely use software applications like Procreate to produce animated words.