Study in Positive and Negative Space

The assignment in Positive and Negative space consisted of finding making an 8x10 image of a black alphabet letter on white background.

There were some requirements:

• The positive and negative space has to be close to a 50%/50% ratio.
• The image has to produce atleast 5 seperate shapes in the negative space.
• The letter has to touch all four sides.

There were some options:

• The letter can be of any alphabet in any language.
• The edges of the letter may be cropped out.
• The letter may be edited to meet the requirements above.

The process of deciding which letter wasn’t difficult. I was originally going to pick a thick cursive “L” with sweeping lines. However, when I came across the font Old English Text MT was exactly what I needed.

I did need to edit the original font to add some weight to make it approximately half of the image. I also added a few extras to soften up the negative space, and make the outcome of the second part more interesting. Finally, I thinned out the negative space in the center of the letter.

Original and edited font, for comparison:

For the second portion I completed eight design variations. The first one was balanced, but the negative space made somewhat of a character, thus changing focus to the background. This negated the concept of using the negative space in Image one and the positive space for Image 2:

Other tries seemed to be too random:

The one I finally chose was due to the balance I seemed to achieve. In this image, the balance can be seen from top to bottom, as well as left to right. I had one heavy piece, and by combining all but one of the other pieces, the finished image seemed to have unity and balance. The integrity of the white becoming the positive space is most prevalent in this one, in my opinion: