These are some quite common examples you might often see with typography based tattoos, as I explained in my essay I felt that this style was usually chosen over anything else because of its more natural and organic appearance. I feel the challenge with designing a typographical based tattoo around a more graphically oriented font is to make it work as an image and not just as a quote or a piece of type.
Here are some examples of tattoos that use a sans serif typeface something that I want to use in my own design to really connect the design back to the idea its inspiration and background for the tattoo comes from graphic design to connect the two disciplines together. I feel these examples dont work as well as a script or more gothic typeface might because the letters are too uniform and blocky using lots or ink. I also go back to the point I think that tattoos work best when they are more organic and natural. For my practical submission i also want to try and achieve a tattoo that doesn't just work on its own but that could work along side tattoos of other styles and not look out of place.
The next stage in developing my practical piece was to choose some words to use as the typography aspect of the tattoo design. I thought about using a common phrase you might often see in typography based tattoos like for example 'only god can judge me' but then I thought I needed to choose a quote that someone might want tattooed on them. To reinforce the idea that the tattoo design was designed specifically from graphic influences I decided to look at quotes from designers. I didn't want the quote to be only applicable to graphic design I wanted it to be more general so that you could use it in the form of a tattoo. I searched some famous quotes from graphic designers and came up with a page from 99designs. - Famous design quotes
Some I felt weren't appropriate as they were too specific to graphic design, for example like this quote from Stefan Sagmeister - “You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt… or in front of a piece of graphic design.” Others though I felt could be applicable to all aspects of life like this quote from Paula Scher - “It’s through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good.”
From choosing a quote I decided to start to focus on a style to use to create the images. One of my main influences for trying to create a new style of tattoos was the modern trash polka style I spoke about in my essay. This style of tattoos has probably one of the closest resemblances to graphic design influences, it often uses type in the design coupled with photo realistic images using a simple colour pallet of red and black.
Its clearly a very modern style that appears to have a mix of many different influences. This style was the basis I wanted to follow to try and create something new, I also wanted to look at designers who based a lot of there work around typography to see if I could translate this style into my tattoo design. The designers I looked at for influences were Kate Moross and David Carson.
This is the sort of work I felt could translate into my own tattoo designs particularly with a focus on David Carsons work because I feel this is the most graphically representative and I particularly like the way he uses type by layering and breaking it up.
My first attempt started looking at placement of type and the sort of imagery I could use to work in conjunction with the typography element.
I decided to use a mix of geometric imagery for the tattoo design because I feel this is a modern style that still has potential to expand and grow. I wanted to lay the type out to reflect David Carsons work and show an influence from his work. After I was happy with the way the typography looked on screen I printed it out to hand draw it as its a tattoo after all and I feel a screen based design is completely unbelievable in terms of a tattoo design. I also feel it gives the image a unique and individual look to it.
I chose a simple colour pallet like what is seen in Trash Polka tattoos to reflect this new style and I also chose to illustrate the face of the designer I used the quote from. I think this is not an integral part of the deign I just feel it shows the relationship between the typography and the imagery to work as a piece together, I also feels it reinforces the link between the graphic design influences that are the root of this tattoo design.
