Zapfino Duck: Sitting

HND Graphic Design project, Adobe Illustrator, 2008. 1 of a series of 6.

This brief was part of our major final project and involved creating a range of badges to sum up who we are as designers.

During my research into Hermann Zapf as part of the Baseline project (images from which I have already posted), I looked at other fonts he designed apart from Zapf Dingbats. I discovered that in the Zapfino font, right near the bottom of the glyph palette, there are a hidden duck and mouse. This tickled my sense of humour as it's the sort of silly thing I'd like to do if I was a font designer. Unfortunately there was no room for the duck or mouse in the Baseline project which I ended up doing, but I thought I'd keep them in mind for the future.

So this badge-making project was the ideal outlet for my love of birds, illustration and daft jokes.

It turned out that the details in these designs were a bit too small for a 1" badge but looked OK at larger sizes. Here they are, much enlarged for your enjoyment.

Presenting The Adventures Of The Zapfino Duck, doing normal ducky things, just a lot more poshly.