For this brief I decided to pursue the staircase narrative. To represent the idea of the man gradually descending I carved out a variety of staircases which lead you further and further down (or up) the page. Eventually you get to the very bottom which is coloured in black – this creates depth as you cannot tell where the staircase ends. I made the staircases on varying dimensions. This reminded me of M.C. Escher’s illusions.
By capturing all the signs found around the typography department, I have been more aware of the environment around that I usually not pay attention to. In these days, variety of signs, logos and numerals were designed to make our life full of convenient unknowingly. More signs are designed. For example, instruction signs designed to remain our behavior of social distancing and washing hands due to virus.
I categorized all the images according to their colors with particular functions. Primary colors that match with black and white letters have contrast effects, as well as use sharp paint to grab people attention.
Besides the function of colors, similarities of signs are that it designed as simple as it can by linguistic and symbolic lettering, we can always get the message behind the signs in less than three seconds without hesitation. I compare them with tiny observations:
Touch Screen Spotify T-Shirt
In the seminar, Matt’s interests were:
I wrote out a few ideas for each and then came to the conclusion that my best option would be an idea of combining music and t-shirts.
My initial idea being a series of unique signed t-shirts for bands that he liked, however I ended up making it a bit more interesting and going down the idea of a touch screen t-shirt that would allow you to connect your phone to it and then control/display the music that you’re listening to from the shirt itself.
Another idea would be that when not connected the t-shirt would display preloaded album covers of Matt’s choosing and cycle through them automatically with the option to change manually with a swipe on the screen.
Broken Narratives – Stairway
My initial idea for the broken narratives project was the stairway narrative, in which the protagonist finds themselves in an asylum for a mild illness, the asylum has 7 floors, the floor you’re on depended on the severity of your condition. The protagonist found themselves being moved down the floors until they were at the very bottom which seemed to represent death.
My idea for the design was to turn the book into physical steps, I then coloured the edges of the lowest steps black to fit the representation of death.
This is a mini project called ‘Broken Narratives’ where I experimented with ideas for a conceptual book and it’s materiality. I looked into the theme of a Labyrinth.
‘Labyrinth: a family moves into a house with unexpected spatial characteristics. The rooms keep shifting position every time a door is opened. The family members are trapped inside the house and start a journey to find the front door. While they keep moving from one room to the next, they discover that they are not the only ones lost in the impossibly infinite labyrinth of the house.’
The whole concept of my idea was focused on the rooms of the house and a way in which the family could escape. I created cut outs after glueing pages together to make a 3-dimensional floor plan of a fairly generic home (living room, kitchen, dining room, etc). I then highlighted in red the shape of the landing and hall way, which is in the shape of a key, to emphasise how the family could escape.
For this project, we were given the brief of designing a book in relation to the story. I chose labyrinth as my theme.
My initial idea was to cut each page into a different maze as a labyrinth is an elaborate, confusing structure designed to make a person lost as the character is in the brief. However, I realised that would be too time-consuming as we only had two hours and would also make the book loose its structure so I then simplified the maze, so that the maze is only on the front page but cut through multiple pages to make some parts of the pages very deep and others quite shallow to add depth and interest to the reader but also to relate to the trapped feeling the character would be feeling.
I also decided to cut the book into the shape of an arched door and painted the front cover as a front door as the character struggles to find the front door. The reason for the whole book being in the same arched door shape, is that the character keeps opening door and moving from one room to another so every-time the reader turns the page they will essentially be in a different room.
When I cut the maze, I attempted to cut it so that, the book would still be readable through the maze but would still confuse the reader. I wanted it like this because I wanted the content of the book to be confusing and lost to the reader as the character feels when the go through each room.
Finally, I added distress to the front page of the book with my nails to relate to traumatic experience the character would be going through.
This is my Penguin Book cover. I used the Gill Sans typeface instead of the Gill Sans Nova used in the video as it was already a font in my InDesign. Here’s the pdf version of the cover: Penguin Book Cover.
In the Ideal gift project, we need to tell our partner the three things we are interested in, my partner likes food, taking photos, and painting in oil colour, so I designed a camera for her which can take black and white pictures after the pictures come out, my partner can paint it, when she uses the camera to take photos on the food and the photos come out from the camera, she can take the food out from the pictures. In the design process, we also need to choose a random word in our design, my word is the bird, my partner told me she does not like birds so I did not draw a bird but I add wings for the camera so she does not need to carry it and the camera can follow her all the time.
This is my messed up version for the Penguin Book Cover brief. ‘As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning’ by Laurie Lee was my book of choice. My first edit to the original cover was to shrink the size of the title to make room for the longer title – this created more space around the type which makes it slightly easier to read without your eyes running off the edge of the cover. I kept the layout of the text the same but played around with other elements of the design. I swapped around the Penguin Books logotype and penguin illustration as I thought the logotype made the cover look top-heavy (it looks more balanced being bottom-heavy). To add to this effect I decreased the height of the orange space at the top. This also makes the design look less centred. My final tweak, to link the cover to the content of the book, was to change the penguin illustration. In my vector graphic version of the penguin I changed two things: I made him appear to be walking to represent the long journey Lee embarks on, he is also carrying a violin – an iconic item Laurie Lee took with him.
PDF version: Penguin Book Cover Laurie Lee Version
Reference Images for penguin:
