Athena Final Draft

After some meticulous path-smoothing in Illustrator and stylizing in Photoshop, we present to you the final draft of our premier font Athena!

The main improvements from our first draft include cleaning up the edges of each letter and making the decorative elements feel more natural. In the draft, the letters had slightly rounded edges, which was less of an aesthetic choice and more a result of tool constraints. During the vectorizing and editing process we made all the edges sharp, which helped to make the font look more mechanical and industrial. We also adjusted the sizing of the letters and made them consistent with each other. The crossbar of the capital A was adjusted to provide a more seamless flow of detail. Finally, the capital letters were also adjusted to be consistent with each other in size.

Final Preview

To help visualize how Athena could be used on the actual book Athena at Night, we also created a mockup of a potential cover.

Our final draft of Athena (the font) reflects our research into Victorian typography, as well as our attempt to stylize it to not only appeal to the book’s demographic, but also what Athena (the protagonist) means to us. By going a different route than following the traditional steampunk aesthetic, we believe we were better able to take an interpretive spin on the themes of the book.

Artist Statement

We developed Athena not only to be representative of the steampunk theme, but to also represent the main character and intrigue future readers about her story. While the theme is important throughout the story, we believe the most unique part of the story is Athena herself. Our font not only highlights the theme, but it also highlights who the story is about. Athena (our font) is neutral enough to reach a male and female audience, while still holding more feminine aspects. Additionally, Athena is simple enough that it doesn’t distract from the cover art of the book and nicely comliments the illustration as depicted above. We felt that it was important for our font to have an underlying tone of curiousity and femininity while also being neutral enough to be intriguing to all genders. We wanted our title to represent all elements of the book, including the characters, story, and theme, while still being subtle enough that the reader does not actively recognize these elements at play. Our font encapsulates more than just the theme of the story, it encapsulates the adventure and excitement that comes with it. We are extremely proud with the creation of this font and believe it is best suited to be the title of Athena at Night.

Thank you for following along our font journey!