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.