Untraditional Letterforms Storyline: Fallout + Specimen Chart

I wouldn’t call myself much of a writer, but I do enjoy reading as well as all other forms of storytelling. I believe being an artist means that you also become a storyteller in some shape or form. It is, after all, the way we spread our messages.

I remember being interested in Fallout, which was a popular video game and was recently adapted into a TV show at the time of creating this project. I’m obviously not a fan of nuclear war (who would be, after all?), but I love a fictional dystopian world with dynamic characters and an ever expanding universe and storyline. I found myself incredibly hyper fixated on the game and the TV show, and used it as inspiration for this project that was assigned to us in my Typography class.

The task was to create an editorial spread that could appear in a magazine. We could write about anything that we wanted! Creative freedom was completely ours. The only catch was that we had to include our own font, made completely out of pictures of everyday items. Our professor called our letters “untraditional letterforms”, which I thought was silly. Despite their nontraditional fashion, they still told a story, just as every typeface does. We were still able to use a normal font front Adobe, but we just needed to include our untraditional letterforms throughout our quotes or within our title or something like that. We also needed to make a specimen chart displaying the font as well as our name for it.

Fallout heavily inspired this project for me. In Fallout, it's every man for themselves in the new world. If you weren’t living in an underground vault with a community, you were surviving nuclear fallout in the wasteland above, looking for scraps of the old world and bottle caps to keep yourself alive, and protecting yourself from dangerous animals, mutated from the radiation of the nuclear blast. Knick knacks and trinkets were priceless now, and could be used to barter and trade, or simply as a resource. What was once a mundane, everyday item on your bookshelf was now your key to survival.

What would I actually find that would help me survive such a treacherous reality? What would I hope to find in such a difficult time that would guarantee my survival for another day?

Perhaps some old jewelry that could be used to melt into a bullet?

Or what about pieces of nature that somehow survived the blast? What if there was a way to start a new civilization with that one seedling?

Maybe some remnants of previous infrastructure that once stood tall? It could become a piece of my secret bunker that I retire back to every other night.

The possibilities were truly endless! A whole story came to mind of what I could do for this assignment. All of my everyday items not only looked like letters, but items that I would hope to find in the wasteland. It was perfect! I wrote a story based off of the character “Lucy Mclean” from the Fallout TV show, detailing her survival of another day. I used these untraditional letterforms for more than my title and quotes, and scattered them all throughout my spread as if they were in the wasteland. It was genuinely such a fun and interesting concept, and all because of my random hyperfixation on a silly video game and TV show.

This project was definitely one of those projects that taught me how to look at everything through an artistic lens. I think projects like these are important for that reason. Life is beautiful and filled with wonder, but only if you make it so. There’s a story in everything you see, and it’s important we take a second to recognize that before life passes us by. I also learned more of the versatility of typography, and the ways we can tell a story using typography, even if it is in an untraditional format.