In this module, we're going to look at creating a local type for your imaginary startup company. Rather than diving in and starting to choose type phase straight away. First of all, we're going to look at the shapes of the letters that you have to work with. So we're going to look at the words or the word that is your company name. And try and examine that a little more closely. So if we use my scargo as an example, you can see here just by varying the uppercase and the lowercase, we get several different shapes out of the letter forms. So already, just in one typeface, we've got plenty of decisions to make. And it's not just the difference between uppercase and lowercase that can create a different feeling in your name. Here for instance, I'm looking at different types of graphic marks that break the word up. And you can see that they start to feel very different just from again, one change. So it's worth exploring the variations in that one change. And sometimes that's a good way to generate a lot of very fast variations to try on think of a category. A change that you might make like uppercase or lowercase or in this case, changing the punctuation. And then trying examine all the possibilities to that could possibly me. And it doesn't mean that you're going to necessarily usual of this. But it's a way to sometimes come up with something that you might not have originally thought of or you might not have been able to imagine. And some of these decisions are going to affect the overall shape that your logo type is going to make. And again, regardless of what typeface you choose, some of the basic shapes are going to be the same. So if we set a logo type in all caps for instance, it's going to make a much more rectilinear shape. It's going to have a lot of more direction to it. But on the other hand, if we set it in upper and lowercase, it’s going to have a little more rhythm, a little more bounce to it. And it's also going to probably feel a little more human as well. As well as looking at the shape of the word, we can also look at the individual characters. And this is where we start to begin to get the direction for what kind of typefaces we might look at. Within any given letter form, there's a number of variations to it and it's still recognizable as that letter form. So if we look at the lowercase a for instance, we can see a number of different variations to it. It can be a single-storey, a double-storey. It can have a serif, no serifs, slap serifs. So there are a lot of variations just in the shapes and again, it's worth doing a little bit of research and examining all of these possibilities and all of these shapes. Because there might be some shapes in a particular typeface that you want to use in a typeface that doesn't have them. So for instance, you might decide you want to make a double-storey g in a sans serif when it's traditionally only been seen in a serif. And if we compare the amount of variations that's possible in the letter forms between the lowercase on the left and the uppercase on the right. You can see that there's actually a lot more variation in the lowercase. So this gives us a lot more possibilities in terms of the shapes that we might use in our logo type. If you look at the right-hand side with the capital letters, the uppercase letters. Those tend to have a little less variation and tend to be much more similar despite being the same range of type phases that you can see on the left. And there are obviously certain characters, certain letters that have a lot more variation than others. So a and the g for instance, are good examples of letter forms that are quite intricate and complex and have a lot of variation. So these might be worth identifying as places that could be typographically interesting in your logo type. But if we look at certain other letters, so for instance, looking at the letter o. There's a little less variation there, it's very, very similar. So this might be a letter form that we know that can't pull it around too much and change its form too much because it's a little bit less to work with that. So again, what we're doing here before we even look at anything to do with typefaces. Is really looking at individual letter forms, looking at whichever letter forms they sit next to. Trying to look at the overall shape of the word. But also trying to identify what particular letter forms might have interesting shape and might have possibilities. For us to develop in an interesting way in our logo type.
