#wk11

“The best compliment I received in the film was that it was the most realistic sex scene that they’ve ever seen two women do on screen,” said Chaplin. “So much of the queer scene and generally love stories, are very idealized and from a lens that doesn’t actually explore the grit and the truth of the connection between people.”

(FRIDAY 15TH - TUESDAY 19TH MAY 2020)

Over this past week I have been attempting to create page layouts for the current zine project. For ages, I was set on creating quite an illustrative zine, however, recently I changed that plan, and chose to base my page designs off the International Typographic Style/Swiss Style, as it speaks more to the time period that Akzidenz-Grotesk was most popular internationally. This change also enabled me to develop a question in my set. Instead of asking the typeface about the hallmarks of the International Typographic Style - which I would be visually depicting in my layout - I could ask about an artist who primarily used Akzidenz-Grotesk and whose work grew from the design period. 

I have done a lot of visual research about the International Typographic Style, to understand the way that typography and shape is used in the design. I remember hearing in a lecture recently, that we should be posting both our successes and failures to this page, so I have compiled a few images that explore some of the different directions so far that I considered. 

These two images depict some early drafts for my layouts. I played with layering shapes and reducing the opacity of layers to create another colour. Apart from the fact that it (left) looks....weird, this approach wasn’t a method used by designers in the period. Shapes were coloured solid, and didn’t normally fill the page, particularly as using the negative space in a concept was popular. I also trialled a variety of shapes, including this four-pointed star (right) and triangles, but they were really challenging to work with, and frankly, weren’t exactly the shapes used by designers during the International Typographic Style period...so I went back to rectangles. 

Grids were a hallmark of the International Typographic Style, so I felt that it was important that I feature one in some way. A week or so ago, I reblogged a post from @est​acabronseryo , that depicted a tiled pink room that bent round a corner. I really liked this concept, and attempted to recreate (top, left). I struggled a lot and was very unsuccessful in the end. Later, I rescaled the grid I had created for my last attempt, recoloured, cropped and rotated it, and simply placed in on a green ground colour. I didn’t find creating this page (bottom, left-side) particularly challenging...more or my issue was creating the right-hand-side page. It was important to me that these two pages looked related and mirrored the same colour palette and idea, but I didn’t want them to be the same in any other measure. I did have a variety of trials, but this is the only picture (top, right) I have from this process. In the end, I settled on a less chaotic design (bottom, right-hand-side) as I thought that a double-page spread covered in grid may be a bit overwhelming for an audience and hard to focus on the written text. Additionally, while I wanted the pages to share elements, I wanted them to be strong by themselves and compliment each other. I think I achieved this. 

I tested a variety of colours in this design, including walking away from clean contrast pairings between a bright colour and black, testing legibility and overall appeal. In the end, I found that using black was essential, as it created a base for another brighter colour and enabled it to be quite prominent in the design. Also, the typography should be the primary design element, and therefore, neither the elements of colour or shape should detract from the type. I also trialled different shapes, but ultimately returned to the rectangle. I just think it worked better in the tests that I did and was easier to manipulate. Similar to the green spread, I wanted these two pages to illustrate a relationship, hence why I also maintained the same colour palette. Asymmetrical balance was also prevalent during the design period so I wasn’t really restricted in my choice of design beyond the colour scheme. I furthered the pages’ relationship by depicting a voice (’hmmm...interesting.......very interesting’) travelling between the pages, as well as linking the question/answer on the left page, to the question/answer on the right page through ‘is this why...’. 

Duchess of Cambridge February Photo Challenge