Above are the inspirations for my alphabet design.  The text source of inspiration is a fiction novel named Keeper of the Keys by Perri O’Shaughnessy.  This novel is a mystery where the main character’s wife disappears without a trace and he has to try and figure out the mystery himself by using a collection of keys he has had since he was a kid to explore his past to help him solve the mystery.  This text sets a very eerie feeling that I hope to recreate with my final design by using keys to make the different letters in my alphabet.

My  alphabet will be a materials based alphabet based of go the different components of keys that I will piece together to form the alphabet.  I plan on having the teeth of the key always face  the inside, that way you can tell which way the letter is supposed to be oriented.

The digital tools I will use to help create this design will include scanners and vector-based editing software.  I will be using the scanner to capture the sharpness of the key’s outline and its teeth.  After I have a couple scans of different keys I will then bring those scans into Illustrator and transfer the key shapes into vector graphics so that I can manipulate and scale the keys to desired shapes.  All of the elements of my alphabet design will be created on the computer, none of it will be done by hand.