When creating my Typographic Portrait for project one, I wanted to be able to incorporate a little bit of myself into the portrait. The story of the reference photo I used was from my high school senior photo shoot. It’s one of my favorite photos of me so I wanted to use a good photo that I thought showed a happy expression to portray the optimism that I have about life and how I wish for the best for people. I used Adobe Illustrator to make this project, creating outlines from the text and making each letter bigger or smaller if needed to arrange them in the shape of my face.

The typeface I used is Acumin Pro. It is a neat typeface but arranged in a disorderly way to express my “disorganized chaos” kind of lifestyle I have. The color I used was black and white to create lots of contrast as well as adding some shading with the spacing and overlapping of different letters. The process of the design was to try and accentuate the shadows of my face as in my neck and ears. All the crooked letters are used to fill the white space as well as create shadows where they need to be. By using letters from my name as the building blocks, I personalized the artwork, turning typography into a symbolic self-representation.