Following on from the ’16 Types’ editorial brief for university, my class was set the task of creating a series of concepts for the cover of the book, a selection of which were shortlisted with us eventually voting on a winner that was worked up into a final design ready for print submission.
My initial design idea was based on the wet ink effect I had tried to work into my page spread title, but due to being created using software, it felt very rigid and planned, the exact opposite of the ink effect I was trying to imitate.
As this was the case with many of the designs submitted by the class, we were told to go away and experiment, do something completely different and come back with some radical new concepts by the end of the day.
After a long time trying to come up with ideas by sitting in front of a Mac and looking at the same Google search results as many other in my class, I decided to head back up to our studio and look for inspiration elsewhere.
The idea of physical, tactile typography, letters, words and sentences that you can literally touch, is something that interests me and eventually lead to me exploring photographic options for my designs.
Our studio is packed full of random objects and I was surprised by just how many other options I had for creating typography without resorting to computer software by using these objects.
One of my first concepts involved photographing found lettering about our studio and constructing a composition using them.
Here I’ve combined a ‘T’ that appears to have been from some sort of light up sign, and a vinyl ‘e’ that was stuck to the wall…
This would need to be reshot to work as a cover, bringing the ‘e’ closer to the ‘T’ would allow for better spacing and a more pleasing subheading. The background would need more consideration too. There’s a lot going on that probably doesn’t need to be there such as the green chair. The blue chairs I quite like as it gives the image a ‘real world’ feel to my designs.
Another option I quickly explored was using a typewriter (it’s ironic how technology seems to have come full circle). Sadly typewriter construction has stopped as of this week, which surely is the end of an era?
Using a typewriter, despite having used one before, felt like something completely new. The use of an ink ribbon gave a randomness to the typography, something you can’t really get when working digitally, and that feeling of not being entirely in control was exciting and inspiring.
Also in our studio we have a little tool that’s used for pushing pins into the wall for pinning up work and what not, which strangely is hugely enjoyable to use. After a few minutes pushing pins into the wall at random, I hit upon the idea of spelling out the book title using the pins and string to form characters in the Zurich Light Condensed typeface (or as close as I could get).
After a lot of photographs and playing around with different lighting sources, I finally settled upon the following concept, utilising the typewriter experiment to add legibility to the design and add some form of rigidity to the cover to juxtapose with the freedom of the string.
Working without software, aside from the actual compositing of elements, really helped me to work differently and just let ideas run free. This way of working is something I most definitely want to continue, as is the exploration of physical typography.
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[...] working on ideas recently for a typographic book cover I explored the option of typography created from physical objects. In this modern technological [...]