Formstorming

Formstorming was a project assigned in my Principles of Graphic Design Class. We were tasked with picking a letterform and creating a photo series of 100 images containing that letterform. Letterforms could be found in print, in a three-dimensional representation, implied in nature, or constructed from objects.

I picked the letterform "H." Over the course of a few weeks, I took pictures around campus and my apartment using my digital DSLR camera. We were tasked with documenting our progress. Once I collected and edited the 100 images, I used them to create a poster to display the photo series.

Digital Photography

Adobe InDesign / Adobe Lightroom, 2019

Principles of Graphic Design

Images 1-10: Process

Images 1-10 were captured with the goal of having a variety of forms and colors. The challenge of the letter H is its rigid, symmetrical form. It is easy to see the letterform in a pair of parallel lines at some point. I wanted to avoid having any two images that look too similar when presented together in a larger grid both on this presentation website and when presenting the images as a whole.

To keep the goal of variety, while scouting for letterforms, I kept color and scale in the back of my mind. If I took a macro picture of the letterform, then I would start looking for a letterform on a smaller scale.

Images 11-50: Process

My process was similar in approach to the process I used for images 1-10. I was focused on variations in color, scale, and unorthodox locations.

I have found that camera shake was an issue for some of my microphotographs. I reshot some images to correct that error. Some other images stand out as redundancies in the series. I took exactly 50 images for this leg of the assignment. For the next 50 images, I will be taking excess images to give myself options through the editing process just in case to avoid having to retake anything.

Images 51-100: Process

The process went well on this leg of the assignment. I kept a similar process to the previous 11-50 images. I was focused on taking interesting images with a variety of colors, scales, and locations.

I did hit designer's block partway through my 50 images. I felt I had exhausted my apartment, yard, neighborhood, and walk to class (the locations most of my images came from). To keep me motivated, I took my camera with me to an antique/industrial salvage warehouse I had never been to. I enjoy antiques, and there are always interesting artifacts of design (posters, advertisements, etc). Even though some of the vendors weren't as willing to allow me to photograph their antiques as others, I was able to overcome my block and found plenty more letterforms in the salvaged material.

Conclusion

The task of taking 100 images of the letterform H sounded daunting at first. I was fearful that as a whole, my collection of images would look boring. I imagined a page full of typed-out letterforms on a white poster. I maintained focus on keeping the images interesting by keeping a variety of colors, sources, and scale. I feel like as a whole, I was successful in that focus.

Although I do have variety in my images, I was not successful in creating constructed images. Overall, I have 8 constructed images out of 100. I should have taken more time to take images of objects I put together. If I were to start the project over, then I would take more time to construct letterforms instead of searching for letterforms.

I would tell any designers attempting this project in the future to keep taking images. For me, the biggest challenge in this assignment wasn't finding the letterforms. The challenge was realizing that some of the images I took didn't look as good on the computer or didn't display well with the rest of the group. Once I hit the benchmark of 50 images, I started to notice some images that were blurry, redundant, or just plain boring. If I had given myself a larger pool of images to choose from, I wouldn't have had to retake or rethink any images I had already taken. Having this kind of flexibility was a lifesaver when putting them together in the poster design.