Tuesday 17 February 2015

Design Principles - What is a Book - Initial Ideas

Design Principles
What is a book? 
Initial Ideas

With the researched collated so far I felt confident in creating some initial ideas that I could then develop into sophisticated design concepts. I wanted to keep a similar aesthetic to Alex Juhasz work in the Babadook as I liked the dark aesthetic that gave a really engaging hand rendered effect. I also my publication to have links back to the typesetting of the dictionary to strengthen the overall concept of my publication. With this in mind I started sketching initial ideas of how I thought my concept might work and how I could bring this together in one publication. 

I wanted to use a really tactile medium that would create an engaging aesthetic with the audience. I started experimenting with Charcoal as I felt this would give a really expressive aesthetic that would be similar to the dark monotone illustration used within the Babadook. I felt this worked well creating a dark scribbled aesthetic but found this style was difficult to express small detail so the illustrations would need to be simple and dark. Another problem associated with charcoal is that it smudges easily, This was problematic so I asked other students if they knew any ways to avoid this, the most reasonable suggestion was to place a sheet of tracing paper in-between each page. I thought this could be a good solution however thought blank sheets of tracing paper would interrupt the flow of the book. Overall I felt charcoal was a good medium to experiment with although due to its lack of detail and likeliness to smudge it was probably not suitable to use this for my publication. 



I then tried graphite as I felt this was a similar medium but was not as messy. I found this worked well as I created a scribbled aesthetic that I feel could work with the context of my publication. I sketched a initial idea of the illustration I could use to anchor the hanging quote definition. This illustration encompasses my concept of taking the typographic definition and pairing with with a more sinister meaning to engage an audience and create a unique and innovative way to engage with the often dull typographic terminology .  I felt this design could be developed further and wanted to create a full page mock up which I could then show to a group of students in an informal critique to see if they felt this darker expressionistic aesthetic works well and could be developed across the whole publication. 

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