When I first heard that we were going to design and create our own fonts and color palettes in class, I was excited by the project. I have always had an appreciation for font and color design, but I had never had the opportunity to develop my own.

I was not familiar with the Web application FontStruct, and I assumed it would allow me to create a font containing curvaceous letters. I began sketching a font that I thought represented my screen name moniker “aheartofstars.” The font was to have thick crescent moon and heart like curves accompanied by a random star.

When I tried to mimic my sketch in FontStruct, I was forced to abandon my font. FontStruct is a great application, but it does have limits. One such limit is that it can not replicate extended curves properly. I felt disappointed and discouraged, but the assignment needed to be completed, so I tried to think of another way I could represent my screen name while conforming to the limitations of FontStruct.

I decided to make a novelty font that could only be used as a heading. It breaks many of Lupton’s rules as the letters are contained within a heart shape. The heart maintains a static cap and x-height, and it always rests on the baseline. I am not satisfied with the overall font.

I did enjoy creating my color palette in Adobe Kuler. As with my font, I built the color palette around my screen name. I used red as the base color as it represents the heart. I used a deep dark blue/purple to represent both the night sky and veins in the heart. The yellow, grey, and white represent stars, clouds, and other heavenly objects.