The Dark Night

A couple more images of my ongoing photography project.

Print is Dead

Here are a few pictures of my submission to ISTD (International Society of Typographic Designers) that has been taken to London today. This book was pretty complicated to put together due to layering of pages, french fold binding and additional elements such as business card inserts and the laser cut box but it all came together in the end, I just hope the judges like it.

As part of the brief we had to write a strategy which gives a little bit more info about the idea/concept behind the book:

Books Still?

Coda is a book about death; it could be considered both an academic journal on the subject of death and a play on the ongoing discussions about the death of print and the physical book in the digital age. My interest in the physicality of books and the reader’s relationship with them instigated the production of a printed outcome, but I wanted to create a further dimension to the reading experience.

After researching the topic I decided to break the book down into three layers. The first is a dying dialogue taken from a chosen film(s), the popular culture element. The second is an academic paper written about the significance of death and violence, referencing the film in the first. In the third layer I used philosophical and scientific text that are seminal to the subject of death, so with each layer the reader gains a greater knowledge of the subject.

The concept of this book starts as soon as you engage with it due to the nature of the outer box. The first act is to tear part of it away, damaging it from the beginning. The body of the text is physically layered, each section with a perforated edge, it forces the reader to break through each layer to get to the next. This in turn asks the reader two things, how much do they really want to know about death and are they happy to destroy or ‘kill’ the book in order to read it. This process of deconstruction also means that the reader has a unique experience leaving the book forever changed, and very difficult to reread.

The layering component also gave the opportunity to utilise different typographic elements and paper stocks that get darker the further the user interacts with the book, adding to the intensity as the topic reaches its crescendo. The use of different typographic features and layout also helps the reader distinguish and navigate through the different sections of the book.

What about Tony? He's lookin' forward to the hotel I bet

This week I really enjoyed screen printing a quick poster project, although it was slightly more complex than I originally thought and had a few heads scratching about the best way to produce and print it. Luckily I had help from the amazing Richard Falle, Arthur Buxton and Dave Fortune.