As part of the OSU Design Department's annual Design Charette, I got the opportunity to collaborate with other design students to create a nature-based typeface for a fictional language.
We brainstormed a lot of existing fictional languages and chose Minionese since it was a way to really let go and have fun with this prompt.
Since our typeface was supposed to be nature-based, we chose to focus on the Minion's obsession with bananas.
We found sources of words and phrases commonly used in the Despicable Me and Minion movie series, and chose to only use the letters commonly used in the language. Since their words were a combination of words from many different languages and gibberish, we used the english spellings to identify the letters.
I helped another group mate sketch the letters, focusing on only lowercase letters. We used these sketches to trace and develop a cohesive style we wanted to recreate throughout.
Our finished digital deliverable included two words made with our typeface. We chose the most common words used among minions: Hello and Goodbye.
One of our expected deliveries was to either make a realistic installation, animated poster, or merchandise design to showcase our typeface and language in context. We chose to make a physical installation by using real bananas and toothpicks to manipulate the peel and create the letters we had made digitally.
We displayed the bananas on a black piece of cardboard and photoshopped minion hands to add context and an element of fun.
Additionally, we created another applied concept by photoshopping the letters onto this scene from the Minions movie!
Overall, this was a really fun project to work on, and the group element made it infinitely more enjoyable!! I got to work with visual communication design students from different years and that helped make it a fun bonding exercise.