Drawing an alphabet – T

Initial idea: death metal

There’s this bloke who creates logos for death metal bands. This is roughly based on a cursory look at his work. He’s done hundreds. They’re all different but also all the same. Obviously, it’s more important to look like a death metal band than to look different from other death metal bands. Which makes sense.

Creating the letter

’T’ is a strong shape which suggested this sort of treatment. Also, it’s symmetrical, which meant I only had to draw half of it, thankfully. The white shapes might suggest an underlying skeleton but that’s sort of accidental. If I were to spend more time on this I would perhaps try and make it look as if it was a drawing of an actual 3D object.

Same but different

I’m interested in this ‘same but different’ idea because it seems to underpin all types of human activity. It’s an illustration of our conflict between novelty and familiarity. We like both – in varying proportions at different times for different things.

Design is very often about creating things that have a function – a poster, a brochure, a website – where the familiar is important and originality can cause problems. No one wants to be confronted by an exciting and innovative website when they’re buying a new filter for the vacuum cleaner. Reconciling the two things is (probably) what design is about.

This is part of a project to draw the letters of the alphabet in different styles.