book cover art

Today in class we talked about where to start looking for inspiration for the cover art of our book we are designing for project three. Since there are so many books out there, I didn't really know where to start. I started looking online, searching things on google images such as "cool cover art" or "book cover design" but the results all seemed too random. So, I decided to start with the cover design (and table of contents, ect..) of the books I have read that have been my favorites and other cover design on the books written by my favorite authors.

David Sedaris

Chuck Palahnuik

election style

In my art history class, the teacher asked us to think about how design and advertising are being used in this presidential election. I started thinking about how the candidates are trying to portray themselves and each other. Barack Obama is clearly depicted as the hopeful, intelligent, common man of America who can make big changes happen in this country. John McCain is portrayed as experienced, wise and traditional.
It is also very interesting to look at the negative advertisement out there for both parties, the perceived weaknesses that rivals try to highlight and use negatively to influence the public. Opponents of McCain use his republican views to make it seem like his term would be simply a continuation of Bush's. Obamas opponents attack him as radical or inexperienced.

album art

This past week I was at Ameoba on Haight and I couldn't help but notice myself being drawn to the albums and cds with the better cover art. I was compelled to listen to and purchase music that was portrayed with interesting cover art that attracted me to it. Because we can not immediately hear music in a store, we automatically judge it first by the appearance of the record.

There are great variations in typography on cover art. Some feature the name of the band or artist through large typefaces and others have no typography at all. By not putting the name of the artist/group on the cover, the art must stand out enough to draw the viewer in and compel them to pick up the album and look at the back to discover who the artist is.

project two, exercise three

The instruction for project two, exercise three was to produce a series of compositions with the formatting options of one typeface, variations of weight and variations of point size.

The exercise above is my favorite result so far of this exercise.

project two

Designing with text type in project two has been a process, with each composition carrying over characteristics into the next and influencing the design of one another. Two of the fonts I have been considering for project three are Garamond and Gill Sans.

Gill Sans has some very interesting and visually stimulating variations, a few I decided to use include shadowed, ultra bold condensed and light shadowed. The variations made certain words come alive and jump off the page for emphasis. I chose this font not only for the variations but also because I wanted my design to be dynamic but easily readable, a quality Gill Sans possesses. It was designed by Eric Gill in 1927 to be the ultimate legible sans-serif font. With its 15 variation, it is of the Humanist classification and one interesting thing about Gill Sans is that the “M” is built with the proportions of a square. (http://www.identifont.com/show?MB)

Garamond is an eye catching serif font named for Claude Garamond, the design based on the types cut by Francesco Griffo for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius in 1495. It is of the Geralde classification, which shows significant contrast between thick and thin strokes and has an inclined axis of the letters to the left (examples can be seen on the letters “o” and “b”. (http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/adobe-garamond) I chose this font because of its elegance and beautiful variations, especially Bold Small Caps & Old Style Figure and italic.

The emphasis shown in my project is the result of variations of linespacing and letterspacing, font size and variations within the font style. Certain things I wanted to catch the immediate attention of the viewer have been emphasized in these ways and others have been down played by, for example, reducing the tracking.

the kelmscott press

One of the things I found most interesting about researching project one was learning about William Morris' Kelmscott Press, established in 1891. He created it for the purpose of creating improved book design and harmonizing elaborate imagery with fanciful text. Examples of books printed by the Kelmscott Press are breathtakingly intricate and carefully done in a medieval design style, making them an important part of typographic history. In all, the press printed over 18,234 books. Many other presses since have been influenced by the Kelmscott and have tried to perpetuate its ideals.

"The Suffering Flood" Kelmscott Edition (above)

Front Piece from "Well at the World's End" (above)

nylon

An example of the use of modern typography that I really admire is the magazine Nylon. The pages are always set up in the most innovative ways, so much so that I would even notice it before I was a typography student. Every issue (monthly) is like a work of art.

Theres also a lot of interesting illustrations throughout each issue.