‘Books that can’t be printed’ – ISTD Brief

Editions At Play is an initiative from Visual Editions and Google’s Creative Lab.  They make and champion books that are powered by the internet.  They believe that physical books have qualities that don’t always transfer well to digital.  Their books show that digital books have narrative qualities that don’t always transfer to print.  Editions At Play is a space for books that can’t be printed.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/9/10936248/google-editions-at-play-digital-books

Editions at Play is all about exploring the idea of “digital books” — not just eBooks, but books that simply can’t exist on static, printed paper.

For the ISTD brief you are required to choose a chapter from a banned book and visually interpret it as a digitally dynamic book.  The chapter should resonate with you for some reason or encapsulates what you believe to be its inciteful nature.  Consider how audiences of the book would have reacted to it when it was initially released.  What was or is the aspect of censorship at play?

Look to use the potential of the digital form to interpret your text.  Consider movement, interaction, reader behaviour and experience.  What can you do that would not be possible to do in print?

Ensure that your outcome considers the dynamic properties of the web and how digital provides you with an opportunity to explore narrative qualities that cannot transfer to print.  Your submission must engage your audience in new and exciting ways.  Consider how we currently engage with typography on screen and how you could possibly engage with this interaction in a different way – anything is possible.

Competition Briefs

I am unwell.  A quick look on WebMD has thrown up a few options – one of which is cholera.

Because of how unwell I’m currently feeling, I don’t think I’ve been able to make a proper decision about these competition briefs.  I worked myself into a panic earlier this week because I still don’t know which one I want to do.  There’s too many to pick from.  This is the University-set project equivalent of browsing hundreds of films on Netflix and then four hours later still not having anything to watch.

Initially I was really excited about the G. F. Smith brief for ISTD.  It sounded like the one that was most up my street – find a crafts-person, do some super in depth sketchbook work, journalistic style stuff, find out everything, immerse yourself, research (and more research), and creating some beautiful publication as an outcome.  This is what I wanted to do but there’s stipulation that you must know this crafts-person.  There is a family friend of mine who had been my Grampy’s neighbour for decades who carves traditional Welsh Lovespoons which I thought would be something wonderful to research, but unfortunately he passed away only a few weeks ago.

I then decided on The National Autistic Society brief for D&AD.  This decision was made in a bit of a cholera-induced panic, and the entire premise of the brief is to produce a film, and a filmmaker I am not.  I had great plans to animate some stop motion thing and it was going to be the most fantastic piece of animation the world has ever seen, then my health improved slightly and I realised that I can’t do any of these things.  Strike 2.

But then… Third time’s a charm because I read through all the briefs again and I’ve now settled on the Editions at Play: Banned Books brief for ISTD.  I’m an avid reader, and I’ve always been fascinated by books.  There’s something inherently beautiful about people reading books and peoples’ imaginations running wild.  It’s great.  I’ve got a few books that I know have been banned in various countries at various times, and there’s a few good’uns I’d really like to explore further.

• Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll. (Was banned in some parts of China for comparing animals to people.  People objected to the animal characters being able to use human language. They felt this put animals on the same level as humans).
• Animal Farm – George Orwell.  (Banned for more obvious reasons.  Bitching about Communism and totalitarian states wasn’t so popular in 1945 I guess).
• Steal This Book – Abbie Hoffman. (Banned for more questionable things like advice on how to correctly roll a joint, make pipe bombs, and some bookstores worried that it would encourage shoplifting).
• The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger. (Banned for references to premarital sex, violence, other naughty things, and a supposedly Communist subplot).
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey.  (Good lord this is a great book.  Banned for viewpoint on government force, and the questionable mental health of the narrator which was deemed inappropriate for younger readers).
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou. (Claims that it encouraged profanity and was filled with descriptions of substance abuse, sexually explicit conduct and torture).
• As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner. (Banned in Kentucky for being anti-Christian.  Features an extramarital affair with a preacher, premarital sex, and abortion).

What a good list.  Who bans books anyway?  Don’t eat food you don’t like and then complain that you don’t like it.  Don’t read the book – I’ve solved this problem for everyone now.*

(*50 Shades of Grey was banned in some countries and good riddance because it’s the most unacceptable pile of nonsense to have ever existed and the people of those countries are better off without it in their lives).

Principles of Hierarchy and Grid Structures in Graphic Design

Our talk with Paul was focussing on how important it is to maintain a sense of order in your work.  Whether it’s a poster, a piece of newsprint or for a magazine, a basic structure will be in there somewhere.  We were asked to bring in a piece of page layout that we particularly liked, and there were several that stood out.  Some of the more minimal ones were very appealing, but even the busier ones still maintained their order and hierarchy by using a grid structure (usually in inDesign).

Prioritising your text into what’s most and least important is the first crucial step in creating an aesthetically pleasing piece of page layout.  By placing the text into a hierarchy you give focus and it shows importance.

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When initially presented with a hideous pile of text with no discernible features, it is easy to get lost and see no way out of the pile of text you’ve found yourself in.  Once you’ve picked out various bits of information (organised into primary, secondary, tertiary and fourth line information), you can start to play with things like size and weight to highlight importance, and by using different alignments and spacing you create contrast.

I realised today how important the use of a grid structure is in maintaining order in your huge pile of text, and to prevent bits of it straying and being too crowded and falling off into white space oblivion and just generally looking a mess.

A useful way of creating dynamism in your piece is to use pullout quotes.  These quotes aren’t necessarily the most important information or anything truly groundbreaking that needs to be highlighted, but by pulling out a few words from the copy you can use this to draw the reader’s eye and create something eye-catching and aesthetically pleasing.

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Following this, we’ve been tasked with creating a piece of interesting A4 page layout, something with ‘passion’ and something that is visually engaging.  We’ll see how this goes…

Letterpress Workshop

Letterpress Workshop today, and it was such an amazing workshop!

It’s hard to believe that these tiny letters all had to be arranged by hand every single day by highly skilled typesetters for newspapers, books, and pretty much any publishing you can imagine.

As easy as it may be to open Word and type thousands of letters in an instant, there’s something enormously gratifying about setting each letter individually by hand, putting the chase into the printing press and watching as a piece of beautifully printed type gets pressed in front of you.
I got a little carried away after a while, finding any surface or material I could and seeing what the results would be. I tried the process again with some scraps of fabric and the outcomes were quite beautiful. They’re dainty and handmade and much more rewarding personally than if I’d made them digitally.

I’ve also been advised by the tutor (after noticing my obvious interest in the process) to do some further reading about the Curwen Press print company.

I also learnt that a lot of terms we use today in the creation of digital type come from terms used in letterpress.  For example, leading (the space between each row of text) comes from the thin strips of lead that would be put into the chase along with the text to create the ideal spacing between rows of words.  The more strips of lead used the greater the space would be.  In addition to this, the words uppercase and lowercase come from the literal cases that the type would be picked from.  Uppercase letterforms would be in the upper case, and lowercase letterforms would be in the lower case.  I found the entire workshop fascinating and it once again ties in with what I’ve been saying about wanting to do things by hand, or using ‘old’ or outdated formats to create something tangible and individual, with a sense of rarity about it.  Despite the letters being uniform, little things like extra ink marks or the indentations that are made on the material that you’re printing onto all lead to something really individual.

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Type Hunt

During the type hunt I found this sticker (stuck in my sketchbook of course, so I’ve scanned it in) which said “ALL TYPE NO FACE” which I found amusing. (graphic design jokes are a thing now).

A few of the examples of type I had found got stuck in as well, and I found the whole exercise really enjoyable.  Whilst we were in our groups roving about the city centre looking for interesting type and all inevitably finding the same things, Cardiff Contemporary had set up a rather boring looking white MDF box with a lady inside who was encouraging us to come back at some point and spray paint our letterforms onto the box to make it more interesting.  We’d cut out the negative space around our chosen letters and had essentially a load of stencils at our disposal.  A few of us set to work spraying paint over each stencil in red and black and it ended up coming together as something pretty awesome.  As we were having a great deal of fun, jealous bystanders and city folk asked to join in and we encouraged them to do so!  One elderly gentleman had a whale of a time and I smiled for the rest of the day.  (a rest of the day which involved cycling all the way back to Llandaf for a workshop that I didn’t have that day as I’d misread my timetable.  joy).

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Typography is more than just a font.

I think an important thing to know about me is that I love words.  I love their use, their origins, their power, and their ability to persuade or affect.  I think it’s an amazing thing that some marks on paper are recognisable as something funny, something offensive, or something that can provoke you.  Having spent most of my school life focussing on my literary musings, having Olwen our tutor reaffirm all of these things definitely peaked my interests for the day’s discussion in type.

“They can entice and persuade, and their power should not be underestimated.”

When you look back at the Egyptians who were the inventors of the pen and paper as a way of legitimate communication, where shapes and symbols and drawings represented their language and their storytelling, through to Arabic and Chinese and the languages of the ancient civilisations on earth, there is one common denominator; that is that without a widely recognised language that could be used and shared, there could be relatively little in the way of advance whether socially or academically.  An interesting point was that typography has changed in response to social, political or cultural changes within society, much in the same way as art and music have done.  We looked at several artistic movements mostly throughout the 19th and 20th Century and how these were influenced by the world around them.

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau typography often contained letters that were elongated, embellished and feminine in nature. Asymmetry, or the use of irregular shapes in design, was an important feature of Art Nouveau typography. The Art Nouveau style was inspired by the curved lines of organic shapes found in nature and was distinctly different from more common geometric typeface designs. Rather than having a manufactured appearance, Art Nouveau typography had a calligraphic or handmade look.

Russian Constructivism

Russian advertising did not promote the desire for an object, rather inspiring a feeling of guilt or duty.  It was an art form that conformed to the needs of the State, with Constructivism advertisements promoting industry or political propaganda.  The work was often dominated by the colour red.

De Stijl 

This was a movement that relied upon total abstraction.  Simple white spaces, lines and rectangles were the cornerstone to the movement, and the central colours being primary colours or black and white with little to nothing else.  There is nothing superfluous to distract from the meaning of the text.

Wat.

Finding a typographical joke is arduous beyond words.  For people whose job it is to use words as an infinite tool to create/inspire/provoke, the Google pond has not been fruitful.  For shame, designers.

“If I could, I’d kern U and I closer together.”

wat.

Marian Bantjes: Intricate Beauty by Design

If you have a spare ten minutes, watch this. It’s wonderful, elegant, and just lovely. Even if you don’t have a spare ten minutes, just watch it.

Enjoy.

So, this is beautiful.

I’m constantly amazed by some peoples’ ability to draw such intricate type, especially when it’s as beautiful as this is.

London

I visited London a few days ago to see a show in Earls Court, but since September I’ve inevitably become increasingly aware of the little things that people tend to miss.  Little things like street signs, graffiti, and simple messages written on walls.  I’ve always loved the London Borough street signs, with the Borough itself shown in red, and the street name below it.  For me they seem to exude a real sense of being in London.  The postcodes, (SW1, W1, SE3), are identifiable and have also become a measure of social stature.  S1 is the most desirable postcode in London, and it certainly shows.