The project started when my friend asked me to design some outdoor advertisement for his GYM. I know that the leaf theme is far away from sports of fitness, however, that was a spring sale on club cards and wanted to make something fresh and unique. 

Later on, this project grew up to a full leaf font with 43 separate signs, including exclamation and question marks, etc. 

I'm proud to share a bit more stuff 'behind the stage' and get your objective critique or positive appreciations (it depends, ha)

The initial task was to create '20%' element made with leafs. As you probably guessed, the discount was up to 20%.

And when I started gathering references I found that there is a huge variety of leafs' shapes and how it grows on trees. 

I've decided to get some real references instead of digital pictures. When a few main leaf shapes were defined, I started doing rough sketches to find the right rhythm. I've started with number '2'. 

Of course, I would be happy to ensure you guys that all my sketches look so accurate and clean as you see on images above and below, but that's not true. Let's be honest friends, most of our real draft sketches are so ugly, that you'll never show it even to your own mom 😂. So I've made a few photos and mockups to present it in a better way.

There is one more scary secret I want to share with those who is reading this text (I believe that 90% never read project descriptions). The first iteration of the font was made in color, but later on, I've decided to create another one - black and white color and more graphical. I think it's more logical to start the presentation with this version first.

When I was traveling to Georgia, in a hotel near to Kazbek mountain, I've made this photo. iPad Pro and Apple Pencil appeared to be great tools for digital art as well as for doing vector graphic. I've tested almost all applications, and now I'm sure that ProCreate and Graphic are the best tools, at least for me.

To make the project more valuable to designers I've made five different styles: Spring, Autumn, Winter, Art Nouveau and Black and White. I hope these different styles could be helpful in doing season-oriented advertisement and designs. The main issue was to make the Autumn style looks as colorful and random as the real autumn is. The most efficient way was to use a few different scripts in Adobe Illustrator: random opacity and hue/saturation. 

It's pretty much it, guys. Hours of work, even days and just this short Behance project at the end of the day. I can't presume if this stuff helps any of my colleagues-designers to save a time and create a good and quality stuff, but I want to believe. If so, I would be happy to see where and how you used this font - please feel free to share links in comments to the project. Cheers!  

 

The project and all source files are available in this

👉 Creative Market project

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