36 Days of Type.
I designed and animated all thirty-six characters of the 36 Days of Type challenge myself, using 2D and 3D to turn a daily typographic brief into a piece of work that still brings people to my inbox.
Scope
Client
Style
Partner
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Challenge
(01)
A letter a day, for thirty-six days, with nowhere to hide.
36 Days of Type is an annual open call: one letter or number a day for thirty-six consecutive days, with thousands of designers worldwide interpreting the same set of characters at the same time. No client, no brief and no scope to hide behind. I did mine in animation, which roughly triples the work.
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Solution
(02)
Designing each character as a static frame first, then deciding how it should move.
Every letter started in Illustrator or Photoshop and had to work as a still before it earned any movement. From there it was Cinema 4D and Octane for the 3D pieces and After Effects for everything else, with a fixed frame size and a short loop across all thirty-six so the set held together as a series rather than thirty-six unrelated experiments.
A daily deadline changes how you work. There's no time to labour over anything, so you commit to an idea early and make it good rather than making it perfect. It was also a nice call back to studying typographic design, spending thirty-six days thinking about nothing but letterforms.
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Conclusion
(03)
Thirty-six characters, finished on time, and still working years later.
I completed all thirty-six. It remains the piece of work that gets the most attention on social, and it's brought in client interest and new projects off the back of it. Personal work with no brief and no budget, still earning its keep long after the challenge finished.
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