At the start of this week's lecture, I annotated my current iteration of the brand's wordmark with the parts of typeface anatomy used in these characters. This helped me gain a greater understanding in the elements which made up a letter form, through breaking them down mentally in order to isolate the parts of their anatomy. I am especially interested in typeface anatomy, as learning this in more depth will allow me to manipulate letterforms to create more interesting wordmarks.

I used what I had learned from the previous exercises to create wordmarks embodying these words, such as filling the bowl of the O in look with a black circle, to give the appearance of eyes, and adding a triangle to the stem of the i, to create a mouse pointer. My favourite of these wordmarks is “back”, where I overlaid the word back with an offset white duplicate, using negative space to create a three dimensional appearance, in which the black word is behind the white. Another i particularly liked was “reflect” as I used a gradient to create a look of water reflecting the word. For “left”, I not only added a left slant to the letters but also reflected them horizontally.

I also found it interesting to see the examples of good and bad kerning in famous brands, and it stood out to me as a concept to be aware of, as the brands which failed in their use of kerning come across as far less professional and reputable then those with good kerning. I believe this is because good kerning in a word mark not only creates a clean and desirable aesthetic, but also conveys the brand's attention to small details.

I created this initial version of my wordmark, creating the templar crest using two capital Ts, the top one with a shortened stem. I also aligned the V with the edge of the serif of the T. I chose this serif typeface as it has a classic and trustworthy type personality.