Painted hand typography

Tien-min Liao

Context

Tien-Min Liao is a graphic designer is a student who studies the different areas on graphic design like advertising, typography, animation and self-promotion. This was a self initiated project so was not made for any particular reason.

Meaning

To help me with the further understanding of her work I looked at her own website and the other pieces of work that were shown on her website/blog. I don’t think the work has a theme apart from the animations being used to show the transformations between the upper and lower case letters and showing all twenty six letters in the alphabet. She does however through out the typography project use the same font to create her words. 

Aesthetic

To create this piece Liao uses only the colour black and paints the piece on her hands to create it. She is obviously very careful as to where she applies the paint to her hand and has to think about this first before she applies it so the letters are of a similar font. She also creates serifs on her letters, which gives it a very formal look.

Through out her piece the colour does not change I feel that it would be more interesting if she blended and changed colours on her hand this way she could give it more tone and would give it a more three dimensional shape.

Personal Response

I decided to look at Tien-Min Liao because the typography that we have looked at so far is just drawing and painting on paper. This way I was able to look at something more creative and different.

When I first saw this piece I really liked it, it reminded me of a children’s sock puppet but in this case it was using letters to teach them the alphabet in a fun creative way.

Liao inspired me to try my own pieces of hand painted typography but this time using colours. I am only creating one letter of the alphabet upper and lower case. 

Lower case ' I '

Upper case `I'

To create this I had to think about the ways I could paint my hands to create an upper and lower case letter and using only one colour just like Tien-Min Liao. I chose the letter ‘I’ which is probably one of the easiest letters to create but with more time I could have thought about a more difficult letter to create. On Liao’s piece the observer of her work can clearly see that time has been spent on getting the letters absolutely perfect and neat, she also took the time to add serifs to her piece where as mine did not have the extra detail added and so compared to hers the font does not look as formal. It reminds me of a font that children would use, a very friendly one. Just like her I was able to use either both or one of my hands on the upper and lower case so was not limited in this way for creating my letters. I could in fact go on to create the other letters of the alphabet but also improve the way of doing my original piece. In addition to the experimentation I could experiment using different colours, this would give the letter shape and tone.