Friday, March 08, 2013

Typography

I spend way too long looking through my font list for the right one to use on my projects.  I don't have hundreds of them because my OH says they slow the pc down - he doesn't really understand my fontaholic tendencies.  Since getting my new pc last year I've largely managed with the ones that came with it .  He did save my font library to the external hard drive and I've gradually been grabbing back those I needed.  This makes it sound as though I know what I'm doing.  I don't.  I get him to talk me through how to do things and I write down exactly in very basic terms the instructions.  I have a book with all these things written in it and one day I will sort it out so that I can actually find what I want quickly and easily.  Yes.  Of course I will - when I get one of those magic Round Tuit things
Anyway, I've had a great excuse for mucking about with fonts this week:because Leo has set a fab new challenge for us over on the Daring Cardmakers
'Typography'
I'd like you to use typography as the main basis for your card design. Typography is basically putting together letters and/or words to form an aesthetically pleasing or artistic design/arrangement. So you're making the letter/words the main establishment of your card.
Take a look at the fab cards the design team have come up with this week and if you need more ideas take a peek at Typography pins on Pinterest, http://pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=typography
I often use quotes with a variety of fonts to make sentiment panels for my projects so this time I wanted to do something a little different and use my Craft Robo to cut the lettering - for this reason I needed a short quotation.
The new set of Crafty Templates are out now and amongst them is a template for a lovely doodle-style cupcake, so I put a quotation, the template and some of the gorgeous goodies from the fab Quirky Kit (also from Crafty Templates) and made this card

From Crafty Templates/Quirly Kits: Cupcake with flowers template, most papers
Supplementary: Bazzill card in a Brick shade (background), plain pink, cream and black
Syickles in black, pink, turquoise and diamond, Gold Ice Stickles
Candle is hand cut

Fonts used
a, is,of, to; AR Cena
BIRTHDAY; AR Bonnie
nature's; AR Christy
WAY; justanotherfont
telling; Hobo Medium
YOU; Broadway
eat; AR Hermann
MORE; High Tower Text
cake!; AR Christy

* In some cases I "tweaked" the fonts so that they would cut better ie expanding the letters so that the lines were a little wider
* I cut all the words in black card as well as, and in the same size as the coloured and then matted together so that the hint of black helps "pop" the words from the page
* The cupcakes are raised on a couple of layers of chipboard scraps to give aded dimension 
Here's a closer look at the cute Crafty Templates Cupcakes:
 It's not a difficult card to make when you have a Craft Robo to do the hard work, but it did take quite a while to put together.  I actually used the desktop in Craft Robo to work out where everything would go on the card.  All you need to do is "draw" a big square then add your cutting templates into it and change the sizes, shapes until you get what you want.  Then you can use the "Position Settings" button to shrink everything to the size of your card/project.  Move all the bits to the side and start cutting.
That's all from me today  Please take a look at the DCM BLOG and also the Crafty Templates/Quirky Kits website and Blog, there's loads to see on both.
Thanks for visiting

2 comments:

  1. I bet it did take a while to put together - lots of fiddly lettering on this one! Looks fab though, the mix of fonts is fab (and would have taken me about a day and a half to decide on!).

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  2. Such a lovely card Kathy, you're such a whiz with your Robo!

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