Every January a group of my friends participate in a month long creative exercise, trying to ride the wave of New Year’s resolutions and create a feeling of renewed artistic energy to start the year.
We call the project Claypot January, and the premise is that we pick one theme/medium and create something in it every day of the month. The scope must be very limited to ensure we can actually acheive this schedule.
This year I choose to do a typographic experiment, I decided to create colorful letter forms from a small preset collection of shapes.
When I reached the end of the month, I found that while I had varied the colors quite a lot, the shape language of the letters I had created was very consistent. Feeling a good rush of momentum, I decided to push the exercise further, unify the colors used and create my first font. A color font, because…why not?
Color fonts are not very widely supported yet, but you can use Claypots to it’s full effect in both Illustrator and Photoshop, and as a traditional mono-color font in other software. I used the Fontself Maker plugin for Illustrator to author the font itself from the shapes I’d already drawn.
Currently, the font consists only of capital letters, no lower-case, numerals or punctuation, so it is probably limited in it’s application. It was great fun to create though, and definitely pushed my understanding of type to a new level.
You can download the OTF font file from my github page for free, and use it in any project you want. I only ask that if you make something cool with it you send me a link, and if it’s feasible include credit and a link to my site.
