Here’s some things I focus on:
- TRY AND GO FOR A RHYTHM THAT REPEATS You’ll notice I’ll start medium, then get to the largest, then work my way down to end it with something similar to the first.
- TRY NOT TO HAVE TWO LARGE CIRCLES NEXT TO EACH OTHER
- MAKE SURE THE SIZE DIFFERENCE IS VISIBLE If you have two big circles at 2 inches and then go to shrink the 2nd, don’t make it 1.9 inches, that’s way too close and will look awkward, make it 1.6 and see how that looks.
- DON'T GO CRAZY WITH SIZES I usually rotate between 4 to 5 sizes between my medium (1 inch) and largest (2.4 inches) and those little baby circles are about .5 inches or .75 inches.
- STUCK? GET YOUR INSPIRATION FROM THE SHOW Honestly, my main basis for the arrangement is based off of the image of the Doctor’s name on his cot in Series 6. It’s helped me the most and whenever I think my sentence is a bit bland, I’ll just stare at that image for a bit and see if I can see something new.
- ONE-TO-FIVE WORD SENTENCES WILL LOOK A BIT AWKWARD Trust me, there is no really getting around it. It’s just part of the system. It’s not meant to show short one word things, it’s meant to show sentences and phrases. Once you hit six words, it starts looking a whole lot better. However, if you do have a short little phrase, there is nothing saying you have to group using the sentence structure. That is just there to help make dealing with long sentences easier.
- FIND A TOOLSET THAT WORKS I use Illustrator mainly because it’s easier to compose and save consonant-vowel pairings and keep things consistant. However, I started with a pencil, eraser, a set of architecture drawing circles, and a sketchbook. It’s totally doable. Those circles though made life so much easier when it came to translations. Photoshop is also an option, whatever works for you, I just find Illustrator faster.
- TRY AND PROMOTE INTERESTING CIRCLES I usually make the more boring/simple circles smaller and make the more detailed ones bigger.
