Typography experiments are one of the most challenging graphic design projects we’d love to share. Type exploration showcases the ability of a designer to make use of typography as the main ingredient of a successful design. The whole process challenges every budding designer to come up with a unique yet powerful type design appealing to his or her audience.
YTD’s featured project for today is a showcase of another awesome typography experiment by a young designer from Germany named Daniel Reuber. Daniel’s project called “Aquatype” also known as TYPE: H2O, is a font set of capital letters made up of… you guessed it, water! The 20-year old creative manages to produce a unique style of using the water element as a beautiful font set with each letter meticulously formed by water splashes, waves and droplets. The set has a big potential when used in various water or nature related projects in print, web and advertising. His recent project called “Waterproof” explored the possibilities of using the type set in various campaigns of famous brands like Nike, Adidas and Red Bull. The result was more than awesome! You The Designer got the chance to talk to Daniel and ask him few questions about his work and some background notes about these awesome projects. Check out the short interview below:  YTD: Hi Daniel! How are you and how's Germany? DANIEL: Hi, I’m fine! I’m really busy at the moment, but I’m feeling great doing what I love. Germany is great, I’m really happy to live here. But right now, it’s still really cold and I hope it will become a bit warmer the next weeks, seems like there is no spring here this year. YTD: Give us a little background about your creative work. DANIEL: Currently I’m studying communication design at a private school, Macromedia in Cologne. This year I was honored as semester’s best student and that makes me feel really good. I started playing around with Photoshop and doing composting at the age of 15 and continuously improved my knowledge over the years on my own. Later, I started to photograph and expand my creative work to fields like illustration and 3-dimensional design. Since I started with that, I knew that this is what I wanted to do in my job. That’s the reason why I started to study. YTD: What are your creative inspirations in your work? DANIEL: My inspiration for my work comes one half from my daily life, things I see when I’m around with friends or just spending time on my own. Other half of the inspiration comes from other artists, designers and mainly music. I’m also producing music beneath my design work.  YTD: "Waterproof" is one of the amazing type projects we’ve seen. Quick question, why use water? DANIEL: "Waterproof" was, at the first moment, just a way to publish and promote my Aquatype I created in 2012. I applied it to some famous brands I really like. Why I used water was because I saw a photographer once at an internship creating shapes out of water splashes. Ever since, I’m fascinated by all kinds of liquids and the possibilities. I also worked with paint splashes, ink and other fluids. But right now, the Aquatype was my masterpiece.   YTD: Can you share us your creative process? From where did you start? DANIEL: First of all, there was the inspiration from which it takes a long time to where I decided to visualize it. My internship was in 2011 and one year later, I had the time to realize it. First of all, I had to choose a font which gives the frame for my water letters. This had to be a really simple one with no serifs to make it not too filigree. Then I created one letter after another and I’m about to enhance the set also by numbers and some special signs in the future so it is more usable for different purposes. 
After these letters were done, I applied them to different backgrounds and optimized them at some parts, so it looked good in a fluent text. Then I finished my work with some level adjustments. The same way worked the process afterwards, where I created the brand logos out of water. I took stock images of water splashes and deformed and transformed them, so they fit the shape of the logos / letters.
 DANIEL: The work was done in Adobe Photoshop CS6. I didn’t have any sketches or something, just started from scratch and yeah, that’s it. YTD: What are your guiding principles behind the project? DANIEL: My guiding principles were to keep it as simple as I can to reduce the project to the essential, the water. That’s why I didn’t use any other forms or elements so it looks as clean as possible. After I put the original Aquatype on a black background, I now wanted to try something different and in my opinion, it looks better on the white background. I took the brand logo itself and combined it with one or the best known motto of it.   YTD: Any other popular brands you wish to apply the Aquatype? DANIEL: For sure, I hope to have the time to enlarge the project by some more brands! But I have to look for is a logo that is possible to work with and to apply the water to and a suitable motto or saying that fits into the series. So, I thought about maybe Puma, Pepsi, or some popular fashion brands like Chanel, YSL or Armani. There are many possibilities.  YTD: Any future plans for this project? DANIEL: My future plan is to make a complete book as well as on the Aquatype itself but also on the brands to create a reference for clients. I already had some requests on buying the font, I sold it for example to the University of North Carolina for some Info material purposes.  YTD: Thanks Daniel for spending some time with us. Where can we find more of your works? DANIEL: Actually I’m most active on Behance. I’m working on a professional portfolio site which is not online yet. I’m also on Deviantart or Xing and so on, but the best chance to catch me is Behance right now.  |
