Creative Typography - Letter Cliches in Illustrator

Following on from my work in Photoshop with making digital letters and using said letter with changed forms to create digital words around well known cliches. I used the word 'Honesty is the Best Policy' and carrying on with that phrase I moved over from Photoshop to Illustrator.
From my cliches i took the word 'Honesty' and then played around with manipulating that word further with various Illustrator techniques.

First things first in Illustrator I first off used the type tool to write the word 'Honesty' and then went onto effects and then adding different filters as you can see by the first photos. I played around with such effects as Cutout [being the first image], Radial Blur [3rd image], Warp Bulge [Last image]. I really like the effect you can get out of the last image on the first photos [Warp: Bulge] as you have a lot of ability to turn the letters in whichever way you like.
In the 2nd photo i started to manipulate my word by using the transforms effect. This is an effect i really enjoy as you can get some many different and unique effects just by playing with the angel setting alone. Couple that with the different scales and movements you have with the horizontal and vertical you have a wide array of different effects. So i took my hand to creating spiral effects which I think turned out very well however i found it very time consuming to get the desired effect I wanted but now i have the settings i can go back anytime to recreate it.
Next I experimented further with some of the other distort and transform effects and this is where i found some i really loved. In order Roughen, Pucker & Bloat, Tweak, Twist and then finally another 3D and another transform. I didn't really enjoy the 3D effect as it seemed a little to clunky to get to work as depending on the font it can block out some of the letter form. I mostly enjoy the randomness of the Roughen and Plucker & Bloat effects, I like how just when only slightly added it gives a fuzz/buzz effect and when cranked all the way up it gives such a detailed explosion of lines and shapes.
The second last thing I experimented with in Illustrator was adding brushes to the outline of text which can be seen on my final photo. This was a very tricky process as a lot of the brushes added effects that overlaid the text in such a was made the word unreadable which is an effect i wasn't aiming for this time.
Lastly in Illustration my aim was to manipulate my words which had a artistic brush added to it further by adding symbols. For the symbols used in my image above are from the grime vector pack and dot pattern vector pack. I really love the ink feel from the grime pack as it works well with the artist brush added onto the image, it gives the image a lot more depth and wild feel. As well as that the drip symbols help make the word feel a lot more alive as if its really been drawn.

Creative Typography - Letter Cliches from Photoshop

Carrying on with my creative typography [Part 1, Part 2] the next step was to take my new alphabet created in photoshop from my oriental photos and to create a word/phrase out of it. For this I worked with using cliches. I used the cliche 'Honesty is the best policy' As i have always felt this saying held a lot of weight behind it and would work well with my different letter forms as they no longer hold there original form. I feel with this phrase it add an extra element to it as the phrase itself is very much centred around not lying and always behind honest with ones self and others around you. By hiding it behind a new layer of language it creates that wall around the phrase showing what effect it has on the reader/person trying to break down the lies to get to the honest truth.

Honesty.

Honesty is the Best Policy.

I really liked the way the final letter forms looked together in an A-Z style but now I've formed a word i don't really like how some of the letters work next to each other. I feel this is because of my choice of harsh vibrant colours but what i really love about it is the way some of the letter forms have been lost making it harder to read the words giving this saying a lot more weight behind it! I'd decently want to go back and revisit this and add a consistent colour scheme throughout the whole piece to see what sort of change it would have on the piece.
Looking at the single word of honest as above with the 'HITBP' i feel the lose of letter forms works really well with the message of hiding honesty as so many of people do. However unlike the colour scheme in the 'HITBP phrase' above, i really like the way the colour worked in the 'Honesty' piece. I didn't plan on this and just got lucky as i used the 2 letter forms going 1 cutout filter, 1 threshold and repeating. I fill this styled worked a lot better then the use of the same style for the whole word.

Creative Typography [Final A-Z Pieces]

Following on from my previous creative typography post, After a lot of editing and correcting a few minor images i wanted to tweak i have complied all A-Z images. This includes my original photos, my threshold [black & white] edits and my 'Cutout / Stencil styled' edits.

Original Photos - A - Z [No edit - Straight out of camera]

Threshold Edits - A - Z

Cutout Filter / Stencil Styled Edit - A - Z

I really enjoyed the whole process of manipulations my originals photos to get to a point of having my own alphabet in photoshop. The threshold edits were nice to do but overall i feel they don't have the same sort of impact as the cutout filter edits. I think this may be because i prefer the way you can change the colour to very vibrant and eye catching colours where as the threshold just gives a very flat feeling to the photos.
What I enjoy most about the Cutout edits, is the way the original letter shapes are completely warped and simplified. Making some letters such as C, E, L lose all form and give the use of the alphabet to create a word or phrase a really interesting aspect, which is something that will be explored at a later date using cliches phrases and sayings.