Type Specimen Book - Editing the first spread

Taking the teacher's suggestion of trying to use only the Garamond font to redo the first spread of my Type Specimen Book, I managed to get something decent I think.

A lot more unified than the previous version. I figured that "street of shops" wasn't really important, so there was no sense in making it huge. "Mr. Utterson" is the main character here, and the first spread pretty much introduces him, so next I figured might as well make his name the large text instead.

I guess in a sense I did accomplish making this spread using Garamond only, because I could easily just substitute the sans-serif font with Garamond, except I felt the spread looked better with both a serif (Garamond) and a sans-serif font.

Redoing this allowed me to cut out 1 extra typeface, so I'm down to 8 used typefaces now. The goal is to make it 3. Considering how I feel the book might become a little too plain with only 3 though, I'm aiming for 4~5.

Type Specimen Book - More Experimenting...

Since I tried to avoid photos, I suppose the obvious other style available is a vector style.

Hm... it looks more unified now, and the typography stands out. The impression isn't off of what I intended to express. Maybe some more effort with do the trick.

One thing that does bug me a lot though is the first spread. I feel that something about it isn't working. If I must say so myself, I think the composition of the first spread is a little messy or all over the place, and the feeling is different compared to the other spreads so far. Words that I can think of that relates to the other 3 spreads are "London" and "literature", and the first spread doesn't express either. Maybe I need to rework the composition and select different typefaces.

Type Specimen Book - Color Version Experiment...

Applying imagery and color to the spreads turned out to be a lot harder than what I thought. For one I think the type is already the composition, so adding anything else felt like a compromise of sorts. I don't think there's that much of an issue if I'm dealing with only one spread, but then I also have to consider how the other spreads work out in relation to each other.

I tried using photos first, using the 2nd and 4th spread to experiment with:

... however, somehow it doesn't feel right to me. Maybe it has something to do with the photos. The photos aren't by me, which therefore makes the result not very original I guess. I've always tried to avoid using images from the internet if at all possible for this reason. Maybe I just felt a little too desperate to finish the assignment, so the result backfired. Next, considering this is a "Type" book, I feel the photos most likely "took away" from the typography. Yah... in short, I feel I need a different palette. Something more vector-like might do. Something more simple, but also adds enough to enhance the typography.

Also, seeing how pretty much the entire scene happens at night, I feel I might end up using a lot of black color. Not sure what to think about that besides a possible lack of contrast, and therefore a not-as-interesting piece.

Type Specimen Book - More Spreads

I completed the remaining 4 spreads of the "story". I also gave the 3rd spread from my last post some grayscale with some of the text, because all of my other spreads had contrast in tone (except the 7th one). So, here is the edited 3rd spread along with the other 4 new ones.

Now I have the black & white version of the homework done (minus the intro and credits, but that will come later). Tomorrow I will (hopefully) complete this week's assignment, which is to make a colored version that includes imagery and cut down the number of typefaces. I didn't use all of the typefaces I listed before though, so hopefully I won't have to spend too much time on that.

Type Specimen Book - Work in Progress

Just thought I'd post my current progress before preparing dinner. The dimensions of the spreads are 16" x 9", as a reflection of the whole wide-screen trend nowadays. Since this is a story, I thought the dimensions would make sense.

I got 3 spreads done (black & white draft anyways), and I think I know where to go with the last five. Four of the spreads will be just like these, experimenting with using typography to evoke feeling and express the message, with the last of the four spreads being the ending. For the 8th spread, I'm thinking about dividing it into 2 pages, one for the introduction and one for citations and typeface listing and stuff (like the brainstorm I did for the Paradox idea). Introduction will tell the viewer what this Type Specimen Book is, and the last page is like a credits page. Not sure about the cover yet, but I'll worry about that later. I have knowledge in bookbinding, so I have a relatively wide choice for what to do with the cover as well as the actual book.

About the actual binding of the pages, to eliminate the whole gutter issue, I would stick the spreads back-to-back with each other. The back of page 1 would stick to the back of page 2, page 2 is a spread with page 3 and the back of page 3 would be stuck to the back of page 4, and so on. It follows the idea of an accordion except sturdy just like traditional binding. Next, since page 1 is pretty much a single page on its own, I would "make it" a spread by literally making it a spread by adding an endpaper page to the other half, which would then be glued to the real endpaper. Same deal with the last page. I know my description is probably confusing, but I'll post some pictures of a prototype if I manage to get around to it.

Type Specimen Book - Change of Plans

While I don't think the subject of Paradox for the Type Specimen Book is a bad idea, I feel that it's not straight-forward enough. There's quite a lack of proper Paradox articles as it seems, plus Paradox is way too broad of a subject as I suspected. Something more narrowed down or focused would speed things up. Somehow I just don't think I'll be able to finish each and every homework on time if I stick with it.

Having another week to "restart" this project, I went back to carefully trying to remember interesting books that I might have read before. Amusingly, I forgot that I actually read quite a few books during the 2nd semester of Sophomore year. There was The Stranger, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dante's Inferno that I considered. I went to the SVA Library to find these books. The Stranger and The Picture of Dorian Gray were both unavailable, and Inferno felt a little too hard to interpret, so I went with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.

Upon selecting the text, I suppose everything just felt like it's heading in the right direction. The creative process is now more intuitive and I saw a reason to select my typefaces first (as well as any other "palette"). I'm not extremely positive I'll be able finish everything on time this week, but at least I feel I'll get more done than getting completely stuck like last week.

The text I selected from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is the scene in which Mr. Utterson decides to confront the suspicious Mr. Hyde by waiting day and night in front of Dr. Jekyll's house, because he saw Mr. Hyde go in once. The story itself takes place in London, and text is focused on describing the atmosphere of the scene, expressing ideas of mystery, silence, and perhaps tension. Those could be things that I could draw inspiration from.

In any case, I made a quick list of the 15 typefaces that I might use:

Initially I contemplated about using Script or Grungy fonts, but decided against both. Script fonts feel elegant in general, but to me the selected text feels more serious, as in "upright" instead of dreamy or something. Grunge fonts is naturally textured, which to me meant images, and we aren't allowed to use images until the 2nd stage of the assignment. I can make the background grungy later on anyways.

Type Specimen Book - Development

Got another email from my TA and I suppose I really did get the wrong interpretation of the homework yesterday. The class is focused on the process. As long as I tried my best, I should be fine.

Back to the Type Specimen Book, I pondered about the subject of Paradox a lot yesterday, kind of wandering around to articles about Paradox as a literary device, Cleanth Brooks' idea that poetry is composed of paradoxes, Paradox vs. Irony, etc. I even looked at articles about dreams (thanks to Inception), like false awakening and lucid dreams, to see if I should change the subject matter because the subject of Paradox felt kind of hard to depict typographically. Eventually I still went back to the big idea of Paradox in general and decided to just go with a book that gives an example of a paradox in one area per spread. My plan is to structure the book something like this:

pg. 1 - Definition of Paradox
pg. 2~3 - Paradox in Logic
pg. 4~5 - Paradox in Mathematics
pg. 6~7 - Paradox in Science
pg. 8~9 - Paradox in Decision Theory
pg. 10~11 - Paradox in Philosophy
pg. 12~13 - Paradox in Economics
pg. 14~15 - Paradox in Politics
pg. 16 - Citations and Typeface Listing

If I need to include something else, I could always just take out "Paradox in Decision Theory" because it's a filler. I was thinking about including a message to express near the end after "Paradox in Politics" and before the "Citations and Typeface Listing", but I'm not sure at the moment because I don't really know what I'd want to say.

Next, I did my first page for the book.

It's fairly simple, but then again I'm more focused on getting the message across. Since this really is just a start, I feel that aesthetics could be improved later on anyways. Good visual communication is always the hardest thing to accomplish in my opinion, so I might as well start with that first. Execution of a plan or complete idea is always the easiest part.

I was also thinking about finishing at least one of the spreads today, but there was just no time. However, I do have a rough idea in mind.

 

Basically, I would use most of the entire spread for depicting paradox in one subject area, while in the bottom right hand corner I would indicate what subject area the paradox covers (see my brainstorm above).

For example (without "imagery" at the moment obviously):

 

I had to make sure the typography works both when the subject is long and when the subject is short. There were also problems with lowercase or cursive because in the word "Philosophy" there is the letter "h" in the back that would obstruct the "Paradox in" text. At least, if this is the page layout that I'm going with, all caps seemed to be the way to go with the main subject.

I'm still thinking about other possibilities for structuring the pages though. I might also tag along a small description about the paradox in each area, just so that all of my spreads would have large type (probably display type) and text type.

Type Specimen Book - The Beginning

Besides creating this blog, another thing that we had to do was make a Type Specimen Book.


So first off, just two ideas for the cover:

 

Not very interesting or exciting covers (much less unique), but it's just a starting point and at the moment I'm just focusing on getting the message across.

My subject is "Paradox". I was playing some Advance Wars 2 yesterday, and probably because the team of the main antagonist is called Black Hole, I decided that I would do some reading on Wikipedia about black holes to see if the topic or article is to my liking. Turned out that all of the scientific terms and theories was too complicated for me to interpret. However, I did come across a term or whatever called the "Black Hole Information Paradox", and the word "paradox" caught my attention. If I must guess, the reason is probably due to watching the movie Inception recently.

I was intrigued by the word "Paradox", and decided that I would just go with it due to lack of time. Trying to think of a way to make the actual book appear like a paradox almost made me drop the entire idea though. It was when I scratched the idea of making the book itself complicated that I gave the subject of paradox another shot.

I'm currently lacking ideas, and still even wondering if "paradox" is a good subject to focus on. There's this whole Truth vs. Falsehood and contradiction thing with paradox, which will probably be a main focus for the book. However, probably because of the vagueness of those words in general that I'm having trouble drawing inspiration. Maybe I need to narrow it down, like focusing on paradoxes in literature specifically.

First Entry...

First entry here on blogger.com. Never thought I'd end up using this blogger at some point in life, but I suppose I can see the benefits of posting works on my own blog. For one, people will get to know me better as a Graphic Designer. Secondly, it shows the whole production progress. In the real world, as I've heard, clients won't give a damn about how much effort is put in because it's the product that matters, but at least for the learning aspect I think it helps us appreciate Graphic Design a little more and maybe art in general as well. There's this whole "creative process" thing that I think is important.

In any case, I just hope I don't end up rambling a lot on this blog. I keep a private journal at LiveJournal.com, in which I tend to write up a lot whenever I feel like writing something. I will try to keep my writing simple and to-the-point on this blog. After all, most people are more interested in the product, as opposed to the explanation if any. I will most likely still write up some things to tag along with my work though, because I think just the work and no text doesn't say much unless the work itself is extremely self-explanatory.

Speaking of work, I suppose this first entry will also symbolize that I've done my homework to register on either blogger or tumblr. Yay!

I'll conclude my test entry here.