“Mantra” Project for my Typography class

This project is still in the works- not complete- but we had to pick a “mantra” and then create it in varied forms across three different animations (done in Photoshop the old fashioned way with frame-by-frame animation). Something not many people know about me is that, especially with the state of the world and also realizing I can’t do all the big dreams I want on my own, I’ve gotten into God recently by way of Christianity. Who would have thought that I would have ever gotten into religion, I could have never predicted that yet here I am! There’s a beautiful verse that I enjoy saying some mornings.

Here is an excerpt:

[...In all my deeds and words,

Guide my thoughts and feelings.

In unforeseen events, let me not forget

That all are sent by you. …]

I went through a lot of renditions to come up with the finalized form of the mantra type-based “logo”, if you will.

The first directions I considered. I made multiple hand-drawn ideas and then put them into Illustrator and used different type faces to explore which direction I wanted to go both compositionally and font-direction wise. 

The second iteration of this development. At this stage, I was starting to think of the letters more as forms and less as type. I also started thinking about how I could communicate the essence and meaning of the words in the way of form, weight, font-style, etc. 

The last rendition of various directions I had for this piece. I had considered repeating the "guide" part but then it read "Guide, guide, my thoughts and feelings, guide". I cheekily thought "hmmm "Guide, 3 times"... 3 as in.. the trinity. Kind of makes sense". I guess I'm a purveyor of Christian jokes now. 

I got feedback in the class that the direction I was going was good, that the font choice I chose had a great variety of widths to it (which is why I choose it- I thought why not give myself as much room to ideate as possible within a singular typeface), and that I really needed to see what removing the negative space between "my thoughts" and "and feelings" would look like paired with getting rid of the other two guides. 

It did make more sense. I also increased the width of the "G" and "U" so it wasn't the ultra condensed, ultra thin variety and was something a bit thicker. The font is called "Obviously Variable". I got the free version (since this is just for a school project) via Adobe Fonts. 

One example of the millions of art boards that it took to create one animation later on in Photoshop.

So many layers for the frame-by-frame. I recalled doing this in past jobs so it wasn't a first time for me which was good. I did this with photos I took when I used to make frame-by-frame product photography gifs for a company's website I worked for in the past. 

Current takeaway (9/30/24) : I got some feedback this morning and will make some adjustments to some of the animations- so that there’s an emphasis on the “guide” and the “my thoughts and feelings” parts towards being more cohesive and flowing from one to another more harmoniously.

I will update as I continue to tweak things!

What do you think about this project? Feel free to share your comments in the comment section!