Text, Image and Typography Part 3: Ex 2 Double - page spread

This two part exercise aims to understand the relationship between typography, the grid, and the page in more depth by analysing existing layouts and creatively developing alternative ones. Both of these activities will feed into assignment three.

Understaning layouts

So, I researched some unusual layouts from pintrest and a few websites. The types of books I found were unconventional in comparison to most novels and stories. I found the layout for a lot of photography, art, cookery and magazines to have the most variation in composition. The three books I focused on were a cooking book, and business' annual report and a photography book. I think these being part of the creative bubble means using unconventional designs is praised and accepted a lot more than say a serious publication educational or as a novel.

Here are the few I found, they are quite lengthy, but each page has unique designs, photos and texts as well as titles not being in places you'd expect.

So out of these book layouts i narrowed to down to 3 and eventual just one I found the strangest layout. Using procreate first I traced around the images, titles and typography to establish the layout shading certain boxes in place of an image.

marked in blue are the image and the black the edge of the pages and writing in this layout taken from a cookery book.

The pictures are outlines in black for this layout, red line for the centre of the page and blue boxes for the writing.

yellow outline is text, blue is columns and seperations, red is edge and middle of the page.

These three don’t have many similarities layout wise they’re all pretty different, the 1st page from a quarterly magazine of a kitchen tool section of the book has bigger titles and small patches of text with a lot of white space including one fully blank page. The colours of the images are neutrals being brown and the design is overall minimalistic. These pages also have an essence of being a diagram with the little numbers above certain parts of text.

The 2nd pages being from Bathurst annual report 2013 book although nicely spaced and structured there’s no particular order, the photos are all different sizes and they’re all bunched up towards the middle of the pages, this is an example of unconventional layouts in books. I suppose it draws your eyes inwards. The text being only featured in the corner of the right page photos and a small but bold title on the left edge of the page. I can see this lining up nicely in a grid but it’s a random display, so it doesn’t look like it following a perfect layout. The text is small as to not draw focus away from the images, but the blankness of the background makes it easily readable.

Finally, the page spread I focused on from a food magazine had the most content on the page except there’s defiantly more structure than the others, things aren’t as spaced out and random, the use of columns create a professional and maybe more serious layout. As this is for a company as an annual report information tops the pictures but the ratio works well on these pages as well as the use of a bigger K at the beginning of the paragraph and the bolder titles and icons above the columns with photos on the right.

After tracing these digitally I printed each of on a4. I think this made the measuring the size of things not very accurate and I don’t know the dimensions or size of the book in real life. Never the less I worked at an a4 scale using a ruler. Using procreate drawing assist and canvas sizing I figured out a close version to the drawn.

Sizing and measuring were a little difficult because I had to consider the folded pages on the images as they wouldn’t have been flat because of the spine so although there’s little inaccuracies on some of the lines I carefully counted the squares and sections, so they would all reflect the original sizing.

Finally, all I had to add was the shaded boxes of the images and using lorem ipsum text create dummy paragraphs/text in the spaces in the original trying to get the text as close as possible using sans serif. The typeface I used was a bold Futura.

 Next part:

'Extend the project by thinking about how you might radically change these layouts - what creative decisions around the grid would you make to improve these designs? Develop layout ideas that ignore the grid structure, challenge it, or offer radical alternatives to the existing layouts. Develop a range of ideas through thumbnail drawings and DTP layouts, in a similar way to the first part of the exercise.'

Using my sketchbook, I tried moving around these 3 layouts in a way that a grid wasn’t needed, I just positioned things in a way that was either random or their sizing together went well. There’s a freedom of going with the flow of what feels right when choosing a layout, of course it wouldn’t be as clean without perfect measurements but there’s something creative and chaotic about having no specific 'order' to a page. My sketches though in comparison I appreciate the original layouts because they work really well, the spacing is more practical, sizing of images and where they’re situated makes a difference with a certain focus on page and text need to be in a space that is easily readable a flows nicely.

similarities and differences of my version compared to the original

 Similarities

•     Sizing
•     Text amount
•     Layout
•     Placement is the same
•     grid method is used same as throughout the book

 Differences

•     Measurements are a bit off
•     Typeface if different
•     Mini icons are hand drawn
•     Images are greyed out
•     Layout if different than the rest of the book’s pages

This experimentation is a good thing to use when you have all the content and information you need for the page to play around with until you find a layout that looks the best or the quirkiest depending on the genre or style.

 

L1. Food magazine

L2. Bathurst annual report 2013

L3. A quartely magazine (king of tools page)