think carrie, think!

As I mentioned earlier, I’m taking a grad typography class this term. I figured I needed a lot more training on my visual design skills and grad type seemed to be the perfect way to do that. And it’s fun, even if it’s frustrating a bit at times. It’s one of those things where you’re just using your eye a lot rather than your brain. I’m never satisfied with my work, so it seems like I’m always re-working my assignments.

The first assignment we were given is to make a three book covers for a series of book by John Cage. Each had to have the title of the book, “lectures and writings by john cage”, the volume number, the publishing company, the ISBN number, and the bar code. In addition, we are to choose only one type system, and use only three type sizes for all three book covers. Each week we do one book cover, and we’ve done two so far.

After some studies of a couple of type systems, I chose to use Univers. I’ll be forever attracted to sans-serifs, and Helvetica was too heavy for my liking.

The first book cover focused on the use of the standard grid, and was exploring simply how type size, weight, letter spacing, word spacing, leading, and alignment affect the legibility and readability of the form. Here’s my cover for this (Book was entitled A Year From Monday)–click to enlarge:

For our second assignment, we were asked to bring in an image of something from nature that had some sort of system. I chose an image of a snail:

From these images, we created some grid structures (mine could’ve either been a radial or dilatational structure), and from that made book cover layouts, all the while thinking about the words contained in the book cover, both in terms of their meanings and their forms. Here’s my book cover for this (Book was entitled Empty Words)–click to enlarge:

I’ve still got lots to learn. But I think I’m making some progress into stepping away from the familiar and trying to push towards exploring forms that are outside my comfort zone.

September 12 addition: Slim, a fellow student, has started a blog for our class where students can post work in progress… feel free to browse and comment!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 and is filed under design, school, typography.