Some Graphic Design Work in Tengwar

I may be done with school, but I’m still doing graphic design work to keep myself on my toes and keep myself from getting too rusty on the tools I use. Here’s a couple exercises I took on.

This is the Youtube logo rendered in Tengwar, the lettering system that JRR Tolkien created for Middle-earth. I redrew every single letter in Illustrator. I feel like some of the strokes could be a little smoother, but as a whole, I’m proud of this. I don’t like to leave a job half-done, so I spent even more time actually making sure that everything was correct.  I ended up learning an awful lot about how the Elvish script works. Did you know Tengwar’s written phonetically and there’s actually two different Elvish languages? I sure didn’t. I think it’s kinda interesting that vowels are actually placed above or below letters, too.

Here’s the Viddler logo. Because it’s a more obscure video site, I’ve included the original logo. The gradient effect isn’t exact, but I learned a lot making it.  Figuring out an angle for where the text cuts into the camera took a lot of tries, but I’m satisfied with the result.