par·a·chute
/ˈperəˌSHo͞ot/
noun: a cloth canopy that fills with air and allows a person or heavy object attached to it to descend slowly when dropped from an aircraft, or that is released from the rear of an aircraft on landing to act as a brake. (Oxford Dictionaries)
For my second Random Words post, I received the word “Parachute”. Since the last post I wrote was more about a memory from my life, I wanted to be a little more literal this time around and concentrate on the word itself. The goal was to illustrate the word to simply feel like it was floating gently in space, like a parachute would, without making it actually look like a parachute.
To accomplish this idea, I decided to create my own custom lettering for the word. I enjoy doing my own lettering, so I thought this would be a fun exercise. First, I thought about a general idea for the lettering in my head. Then I laid out a grid of sorts in Adobe Illustrator to start creating all of the key shapes for my letterforms (see above image). I find this process generally helps me keep all of the letterforms more consistent, because rather than creating a shape every time I need one (which may be slightly different from one I already created), I can simply duplicate a shape I already created and use it instead.
I kept the font weight light, but somewhat condensed, with a very simple and rounded style, and a healthy amount of tracking to promote a light airy feel. In case you are not familiar with the term “tracking”, you can learn all about it in my Typography 101 posts. To literalize the concept just a touch, I added a slight arch to the type and blue sky pattern as a backdrop.
This was another fun exercise to experiment with a different concept than my last post. Stay tuned for more “Random Words” posts in the near future!