Assignment Five
As I said in part three:
I think I would like to select a paragraph or poem and create a booklet with it. In it, I would play around with the lettering and push the typographical elements while still maintaining imagery that connects with the theme or with the mood of the text and remains visually appealing/readable.
Planning
The first step in creating this book would be research. I need to research books which are similar to my requirements above. Poem books, art books and art zines are probably my best bets. I have resources from previous research on these topics and will visit the same websites, since actually going somewhere to find something like that is not really an option. If I did want to, the best option would probably visiting the children’s sections of bookstores. Given Covid restrictions, I wouldn’t take long on this.
The idea generation step would probably take a bit longer, though I am working under certain limitations such as standard page sizes. I plan on doing a range of experiments to choose from, some digital and some analogue. I would take at least two or three days to throw around ideas and create a mock-up, then another to make adjustments.
Lastly, the final digital product has to be taken into town for printing and binding. I don’t know exactly how long this could take, or if they would need me to make certain changes, but I hope it’s not more than a week.
Research
While looking for inspiration, I did not yet have the poem that I would create the small book for, I only had the vague impression that I wanted to look for books or magazines with dramatic and expressive lettering. Zines were only a little helpful, I liked how many of them did handwritten text. Actual magazine designs were more inspirational. The line of images was getting too long on the blog, so I kept most of those on a Pinterest board that I already had from previous assignments, but added to for this one.
Wet Cement: A Mix of Concrete Poems by Bob Raczka was also very close to what I was picturing, if a little simple. I do not think I will be creating something similar, though because the wording is obviously very specifically chosen to create those images, and it might not be possible to do that if I use an already existing text.
Blue Lipstick: Concrete Poems by John Grandits has a more flexible approach, though. The text isn’t as minimalistic and he plays with creating images with multiple lines of text rather than using very few words.
A poke in the I: a collection of concrete poems by Paul B. Janeczko and Chris Rashcka veers a little from the other two because of the illustrations. Although the illustrations do no simply sit next to the text to build it, they also interact with the text. This is a fairly modern approach mostly found in children’s books, therefore I started looking more at those.
A Dazzling Display of Dogs and A Spectacular Selection of Sea Critters by Betsy Franco and Michael Wertz are very charming examples of text and image working together to create both visual appeal and to support each other.
Other children’s books I have found don’t quite implement text inside the image as much as the above two books do. Many of them do change the look of certain words to achieve an effect like in Construction Crew, and others emphasize a single word and ply around with the flow of the text a little like in Bear Feels Sad by Garry Fleming (Romanian version pictured), which I found in a bookstore nearby.
I looked up the poetry book sections, but it seems very few of them play around with typography. This is an example of poetry written by multiple people in their own handwriting, accompanying quirky photographs of the author.
All the while I was looking up inspiration for the look of the book, I was also thinking of content. I wanted to use a poem of a decent length as this will be a book and not a flyer; however, the approach I was thinking of included really magnifying a few words perhaps over the spread of two pages. This meant that the poem could not be too long either.
I looked through poems I knew and found a few I had not read before, but despite the fact that I found some nice ones I somehow still gravitated to a rather typical artist’s choice: “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Lewis Carroll’s works are favorites of visual artist’s because of the strange whimsy of his imagery, and this nonsense poem specifically has always been a personal favorite. It still makes me smile every time I read it.
Before making any sketches, I sat down and analyzed the poem a little. I printed out the poem and took notes around it, starting with the obvious: the poem has seven stanzas and the first and last one are exactly the same, each stanza has four lines, and the word “Jabberwocky” is very long at eleven letters. Then I tried to go a little past that. I noticed, regardless of the nonsense words, that the first and last stanza describe a time and a place, the second and second to last stanzas are within quotations and the person speaking in both is the father, the third and fifth stanzas describe a bit of journey and a bit of action that bleeds from the fourth stanza, which is the action stanza and the Jabberwock’s real appearance in the poem, as before he was only mentioned by the father in his warnings.
The poem depicts the classic hero’s journey. First there is a peaceful world, then the inciting incident/call to adventure in the form of the Father’s warning, showing that the once peaceful world is threatened by a monster. Then the main character (the son) goes on a journey in the first two lines of the first stanza, and in the last two he arrives to a resting place. The action of the story goes up with the journey, down with the rest under the Tumtum tree (though the poem says that he “stands” not “sits” therefore the rest is not as peaceful as it is at the beginning in the first stanza; the threat of the Jabberwock still hangs in the air). The action sharply rises with the unexpected attack of the Jabberwock. The fourth/middle stanza of the story is the main conflict, the meat of the journey. Then in the first two lines of the fifth stanza, it reaches its climax in the words “snicker-snack”, clearly describing the action of the blade as it cuts off the head of the monster. The journey back with the monster’s head is told in the last two lines of the stanza. The resolution comes in the form of the Father’s question, then jubilation that the monster has been slain. This is the reward that comes in answering the call from the beginning. in the very last stanza, which is identical to the first, peace is restored to the world.
Thus, even thought the story is told using nonsensical words, it is easily understood. The story of the hero’s journey is one of the oldest in existence, and we have heard it in enough forms to easily recognize and follow it even in a poem with funny words in it. Though most of the nonsensical words are rather onomatopoeic, or similar to words we know. It doesn’t take much to understand what they mean.
When analyzing the poem, I used some color coded dots to help with understanding it. Green for the peaceful world at start and end, yellow for warning and for jubilation, orange for journey forth and back, and red for the Jabberwock. I end up using these colors later in the project to separate the actions and bring unity to the book.
Since experimenting with typography and especially type is the purpose of the exercise, I refrained from sketching out monsters and young heroes, but instead played around with the words themselves. I used colored and black ink on large sheets of paper, with several types brushes and pen nibs. I also tried markers and acrylic paint and experimented with different types of paper. I first wrote out the word Jabberwocky in different ways, since the title page would need a unique design and that seemed as good a place as any to start. I elongated many of the designs because the eleven letter word is difficult to fit on an upright page, but I also sketched it out on landscape formats and overlapped letters or multiple words with transparent washes.
I also tried writing out full stanzas on a single page with odd letters, sometimes printed sometimes in cursive. The printed ones were much easier to do with markers or pens than with brushes or pen nibs. Some stanzas I started out by writing in very large letters on the A4 page, then finishing the last couple of lines in very small text around the large letters, which would theoretically be read last. I varied the way I wrote the words on how they sound, like the words “one two, one two!” and “snicker-snack” from the climax, which demand a lot of energy and therefore I tried to write them quickly and sharply. Or the words describing the peaceful world, which seem to flow somewhat slowly, I wrote by not picking up the pen from the page.
It was then time to make my first mockup because with so many pages strewn about, the flow of the story was rather nebulous in my mind so I needed to be able to turn the pages and see how the words may flow from page to page. I folded several small pages into a A6 format because: (1) I knew that I wanted the book to be small, like a lot of poetry books I have seen, (2) it will be a very short book if it contains only one poem (3) an A6 is much easier to print and cut than other formats and therefore I imagine the end product has a better chance of coming out nicely in the final product.
This little book was subject to much, much erasing and revision, most of which is still imprinted in the paper. I had started by writing out the stanzas as I had written them during the previous brainstorming stage, then slowly refined the text and the flow until I felt I had something that I could work with. It is in this stage that I added some illustrations to some of the pages.
A peaceful scene with rolling hills and a little house at the beginning and at the end of the book, though they are not precisely identical. The image at the beginning is framed by leaves as if the scene is being spied through the foliage, while the one at the end does not have the leaves, as if no one is looming over the scene anymore. Though the reader will only realize this in retrospect, if they do at all.
For the second and penultimate stanzas with the Father, I sketched out two stylized profiles, the first distressed and the second jubilant. Then in the continuation of the warnings of the Jubjub bird and Bandersnatch, I made a sharp outline of a bird and claw marks for the Bandersnatch.
For the journey, I drew a sword containing some words, then arranged the “long time the manxmome foe he sought” in a winding line, as if they follow a road which eventually points to the next page with the young man standing under a “Tumtum tree”. Who knows what that means, I just drew a regular tree to keep things simple and allow the audience to imagine whatever they want.
The Jabberwock is also very stylized. I decided not to show the entirety of it, just a head, a wing and tail separating the words.
To better cement my ideas and to develop them a little, I made a second mockup, this time with two cover images and instead of drawing in pencil, I used pens with sharp and felt tips both. It was here that I decided I wanted each “voice” in the poem to have a different font. The poem has the narrator, and the Father as two clear voices, but I also wanted the climax to have a different font, preferably something sharp and dangerous-looking. I thought the Father’s words should look more personal and friendly, though the words of warning at the beginning created a bit of a dilemma, because words of warning shouldn’t look friendly. The words of the narrator should be invisible, while also evoking a fairytale sort of feeling. I also fully established how many pages I wanted each stanza to have. Most of them have three pages, except for the Jabberwocky stanza which has a double page spread, but no extra page and the last Father stanza which must be accorded two in order to not throw off the last stanza which must have three to mirror the first one in rhythm.
Though I did not want the first and last to be precisely the same, even if the words are. Because the absence of the Jabberwocky must have created some sort of difference. Both stanzas are separated in the first part with setting of the time “‘Twas brilling,” and the second part the setting of the place with a spread sharing the rest of the stanza. But the first stanza makes an initial bold statement with literally very large words which fill the page, while the last stanza begins which much more regular-sized words, theoretically in a much more peaceful manner than at the beginning.
The real work began when I started everything again digitally. Now that I had a general layout of the words and an idea as to how I wanted the typography to look like I could look for a more definitive result. So I started experimenting with various fonts for all three “voices” for the poem, though I only ended up saving a few trials. The bulk of images I had was large enough already. I drew out the images and experimented with how to arrange the words around them. Choice of font was not much affected by this for most of the book, except for the Father’s stanzas. Since the profile of the Father takes up half of the page on the vertical, I needed to find fonts which were both friendly-looking (not sharp or pointy) and tall. The words needed to fit within the narrow space without being far too small in comparison with the rest of the book. This narrowed down my choices, but I eventually found a font which I liked.
I also spent a lot of time on the very first page of the book, the initial “‘Twas brilling,”. The book needed a bold entrance, and I wanted this to be done with very large words, but how it was done kept changing throughout the process, as I either experimented with the fonts or changed them entirely when changing the font for the rest of the stanza.
And that font was one that changed back and forth for a while, until I realized that I wanted to separate the narrator from the first and last stanzas of the poem. The storybook element of the font I had used for all those parts, and which I really liked, seemed like too much in relation to the other fonts throughout the book. It is not a very fancy font, just a serif storybook kind, but I still wanted something a little cleaner looking and more “invisible” for the narrator. Clearly, that same font did not evoke the same storybook feeling when in the first three pages, and disconnected the first “‘Twas brilling,” a little too much from the stanza itself. So I decided to create a new “voice” in the first and last stanzas in order to keep the best of both worlds. This also cleared up the whole mess with the first page, because now I had to narrow down my choices to the ones that used the font matching the stanza.
I decided to keep the handwritten text at the spread with the Jabberwocky because I liked the dynamism of it, thought the arrangement of the words themselves took a little tweaking.
The same for the climax of the poem, though I varied it a little by capitalizing and enlarging the words on the page in order to create a larger moment and give the individual actions of the words more weight. Initially, the “snicker-snack” was also handwritten, but it kept not looking interesting enough for the climax, so I eventually experimented with type until I created the split version, which I ended up being very proud of, because it depicts precisely what it should (slicing off the Jabberwock’s head), while also remaining readable text.
While I worked on type, I also developed the images little by little until I was satisfied with the simple, but effective end result. I didn’t want the images to overtake the text, but to add to it.
After I was happy with both text and images, I printed out the pages one-sided because I wanted to be able to paint on the printer paper without making holes in it and ruining both font and back of the page. I “bound” the pages by gluing recto and verso together, then experimented with some color. Using gouache paint, I started to establish where I wanted the colors to go, their intensity and how they could enhance the text and images. The colors themselves I selected from that first analysis of the poem, because those colors would do a wonderful job of both bringing unity to the book and showing a sort of build up in intensity from peaceful green to yellow, to orange then red, and then going on the same path down again. I didn’t need to do this step on paper, experimenting with color was obviously much easier in a digital format, but I find that the process is smoother for me when I think on paper first. Having the physical thing in front of me seems to make it easier to make decisions in regards to composition.
Colors largely established, I repeated the process digitally, this time taking my time a little more and making some improvements as I went. The way I usually approach color is very painterly, but because I wanted this book to look very simple I decided to keep it flat in the sense that I didn’t use brushstrokes to build it up, but I did add texture overtop because it turns out that not using texture makes everything look frightfully flat and boring. At least for the style that I drew these illustrations in.
The book itself finished, I felt ready to tackle the covers. I experimented with a couple of different approaches inspired from the very first ink drawings I created for this project. The final design was drawn by hand, with a gradient of the colors used inside the book overlaid. Because the text, while pretty, is not exactly readable, I wrote the title overtop and author underneath using the font used in the first stanza. I debated using the Jabberwocky for the back cover, but eventually decided that I want the punch of the red Jabberwocky to be reserved for reading the book, so I used the “vorpal sword” which shore off the Jabberwocky’s head instead.
Because I wanted to have something concrete to show the people at the digital printer, I printed out the pages and created the final mock up at home. Paginating was an absolute nightmare, because I had to find a way to paginate so that the A4 printer would print out two spreads on the same page both front and back. Needless to say, I put much too much time and frustration in the endeavor. It was worth it because I ended up changing the second cover, which was basically the same as the first but with “Illustrated by Sara Voaides” instead of “a poem by Lewis Carroll”. It looked odd, something that I didn’t notice when it was just on the computer, though not much else can be said for the mockup because the people at the digital printer didn’t really need it.
Printing the thing was an adventure all on its own. First I took the files I had to them, and after a rather confusing conversation, we established that the PDF files I had were not right for the type of binding I wanted. They would have been fine if I had only wanted it printed right then and there, then stapled. But since they did perfect binding, I requested that. It turns out that the files with the spreads wasn’t what was needed for that, and neither was the elaborate pagination I had constructed in order to have it folded properly. They would simply create that themselves to suit the printing machines (which they did not have on site, but somewhere else). So then I had to take a trip home, export the files from InDesign as pages and not as spreads and come back with them. This seemed satisfactory, so they said that the book would be finished by Wednesday (it was Thursday, but they don’t work weekends and there was a national holiday on Monday and Tuesday.)
So I waited until Wednesday, and excitedly went to pick it up. I paid, made the mistake of not checking the work, went home, and lo and behold it was printed out wrong:
