ISTD True Stories: True Geographies

Experimenting with the story of a night out has allowed me to incorporate many aspects of design, as opposed to creating a purely typographic solution. The nature of the project has given me the opportunity to use photography and my concept choice has meant I have been able to design different medias including the pub posters, as well as the final book.

I feel that my experimentation with the book format takes the reader on a journey and really makes the reader become a part of it through the twists and turns (literally) of the night.

In terms of readability, I realise that the overall design may be slightly overwhelming. Using white text on a black background reflects the night setting, and incorporated with the way the type size gradually increases to give it a drunk feel successfully shows the development of the night. Understandably, readability is slightly lost because of this choice, but I felt this was needed as it gave a great coherence with the imagery. It is because of this that I included design choices such as a graduated colour at the start of each new sentence, as well as a specific typeface to reflect each character. This attempt to increase readability meant that the reader can successfully identify where to read and adds an aesthetic quality the piece.

Different typographic choices for each venue allowed me to reflect my knowledge about the characteristics of typefaces, and how they can be used in accordance with other objects to reflect historical or social features. Choosing serif typefaces for traditional venues, and sans serif typefaces for modern venues and using them in multiple places within the book meant there would be a substantial coherence to the piece.

As I referred to before, I used a graduated colour to reflect the start of a new sentence within the block of text to increase readability. I experimented greatly with different ways to increase readability initially, but found that this solution worked most successfully because I had used the graduated style previously within the path of text that flowed between images on the reverse of the book. Using the idea of graduating the colour of the text leading up to the images meant that the abrupt halt of a newly introduced colour distracted the reader, hence by slowly and subtly blending the colour to match the pub name it allowed for the readers eye to flow a lot easier.

The overall book structure suggests that the nights out are always busy around the town. With different narratives flowing from one page to the next, it keeps the reader aware and having the text dividing itself at certain parts of the page, gives the reader the ability to move on of their own accord. By making the reader consider each different typographic narrative means that they have to work a little to understand the information they have been given.

The complete aesthetics of the piece are interesting and I feel that they successfully reflect the brief through the way the typography is used within media already found around the town, which is then merged with my own typographic narrative. I feel the conjunction between photographic and computer manipulated type work well together throughout the development of the books structure, with the conclusive paragraph bringing all aspects of the concept together.