36 days of type - 9 FIN

This is now the 36th day that I've woken up and been filled with dread and excitement as I scrambled around for research and prepared a response for 36 days of type. Today was the turn of the number 9 which I would ordinarily form by flipping a 6 and performing some minor adjustments but today, of course, I had to go out on a solid level and make sure the quality (which I think has been exceptional throughout the numbers) doesn't drop. This thought, however, can put a lot of pressure on and today, like any other, I felt at times that the number was largely shit.

I was a little worried about my choice of number as it dates back to a similar era as most of the letters but I think the style itself has such strong connotations of an era Scifi era that its pretty transient across time. Time, however, was the reason that linked Futurism to the number 9 as I found out the movement was conceived in 1909. Credited to an Italian poet called Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who released his Manifesto of Futurism in Italian and French newspapers of the time. The movement, especially in its Italian epoch was multi-medium and spanned across music, literature, art and design. In his manifesto, Marinetti expressed a 'passionate loathing' of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. The movement glorified progressive concepts such as speed, technology, youth and violence as well as innovation hallmarks of the era such as the aeroplane, car and industrial city. Still fairly fresh into the modernist era Futurism perfectly encapsulates the modernist values of the time and was seen as a representation of technological triumph over nature. 

"They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, praised originality, "however daring, however violent", bore proudly "the smear of madness", dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against harmony and good taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and gloried in science."

With these source images, primarily from the Italian futurist era, in mind, I set about sketching in an attempt to create a character that encompassed some of the key themes of speed, technology and innovation. I liked the idea of incorporating a central focus like the pointed front of the train in Ivo Pannaggi's Speeding Train pictured above. The curvature of the 9 links in nicely to futurism but there needed to be some more complex collisions of forms in an almost cubist manor.

I tried to use line moire patterns by overlaying two sets of radially declining circles that allow for shade and highlight as if the circle could be threedimensional and made out of a highly reflective material such as metal. The moire was done in a painstakingly long process of copying pasting and reducing circle size by 5% each time until I reached a fine point. I then transfered the vectors form illustrator to photoshop for some extra shading.  

The idea was to create a bent tubular form that almost reminded me of the film Airplane. Shading was applied to both the curved body form and the negative space moire to give extra depth and a slightly off-centre gradient in a blue and white that in some ways symbolistic of the sky, continuing the plane theme.

"9 is for Futurism - in 1909 Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the ‘Manifesto del Futurismo’ an artistic philosophy that rejected the past and celebrated new concepts of speed, machinery, violence and industry. Championed by fairly recent inventions such as the car and plane. Setting out guidelines for progressive and futuristic art and culture. I’ve attempted to create a sense of motion and perspective through shading and line moiré patterns."