Away From Keyboard

I follow Typography Secrets of Six-Figure Designers on Facebook and participated in the Text Symbol challenge!

Here is a part of the prompt:

Typographic symbols such as the & or @ originally evolved out of phrases for short-hand and have become an integral part of written communication. In the current world of texts, chats, emails, and tweets, abbreviations have become a linguistic device in and of themselves. The challenge is to design a typographic symbol system based on an existing typeface for these commonly used abbreviations. Using the most common three-letter abbreviations from a provided list, create a new typographic symbol system through deconstruction, reassembly and grouping of whole or partial letterforms…

At the time, I was trying my hand at playing World of Warcraft and I never know what certain acronyms mean in gaming, so I thought this was a great way to learn! AFK is one that I could wrap my head around…and I was able to poke some fun at my boyfriend in the process. I think for a first try at creating a symbol that has some of the letters touching, I did a decent job. If I were to try this again, I would want to dive deeper into how ligatures are created and why they are created the way they are.

The design process for this was a lot of zooming out and testing what things looked like as if it were text on a mobile device.