What is this project about?
This is a first set of wallpapers made to showcase fonts available through Adobe Typekit, a subscription font service that comes with Adobe Creative Cloud. I am working with the Typekit team to develop a set of creative wallpapers, using various fonts available to use on a website or in applications. The idea is to have a theme centered on the ampersand glyph.
So far, after making a number of experiments, I have been most inspired by the Garamond Premier Pro ampersand (which has two distinctive shapes, one for italic and one for regular style). I find them both elegant, timeless and very flexible.
To create these wallpapers, I gravitated towards a few rules:
- "Almost" black and white. I prefer wallpapers that are subdued in their color palette, so I decided to constrain my designs to be very close to black on white, even though they have a warm tone.
- 3D Extructions. The only effect allowed on the Ambersand glyph is 3D extrusion.
- Use Symetry. Rely on at least one symetry.
I am fascinated by the different reactions I get when I show these images to people around me. Just like cloud formations allow us to project our imaginations and see different animals, landscapes or faces, I have worked to create abstract shapes, from the ampersand glyph, that can evoke human or animal faces with different expressions, varying from scary, beligerent or mesmerizing.
Process
I created these wallpapers in Cinema 4D and Photoshop. In Cinema 4D, I use very basic lightling (2 to 4 lights) and I use sketch and toon materials which lend a very graphical look. I then take the Cinema 4D rendering into Photoshop for compositing and texturing. I use brushes and textures from the Creative Cloud Market assets (which I access through Creative Cloud Libraries) and from subtlepatterns.com.
I have included screenshots of the different phases below.
Mobile Phone Wallpapers
Desktop wallpapers are further down on the page.
Desktop Wallpapers
Process Steps
The compositions start in Cinema 4D with extruded text and symetry objects to create the composition's basic layout and lightling. At this step, I am looking for the ambient occlusion and the long shadows. Thanks to the multipass rendering feature of Cinema 4D, I can get the lighting, shadows and ambient occlusions as separate layers in the Photoshop file that Cinema 4D generates. I am then able to manipulate these layers for final compositing and texturing in Photoshop.