REFLECTION ON PRACTICE
FL2017
JEE KIM
RESEARCH
PROJECT* SUMMARY 03
The objective of the project was to design an expressive and eye-catching book jacket for a classic fiction, The Stranger, written by Albert Camus. The title of the book was to use 3D type, one that is physically made, staged and photographed.
*This project was a response to a prompt in a course, Type 2, taught in Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.
01 RESEARCH RESEARCH
The challenge of this project came in two parts: understanding physical type, and understanding how to design a book jacket. I mainly looked at experimental photographs, particularly the ones by Man Ray and Stefan Sagmeister to gather an idea of expressive staging. A hint I took away from this part of the research was that the material the physical type was made out of was extremely critical to its nuance, tone and the mood. The type relied on its medium to deliver the true essence of its meaning. As I had little idea how to even approach designing a book jacket, looking at Peter Mendelsund’s works and listening to his interview on NPR St. Louis Public Radio was immensely helpful. The part that most stood out and later helped me navigate through the project was how closely he worked with the actual manuscript he was designing for. He stressed how much he immersed himself reading the book to extract his most authentic response and impression of the story.
-Peter Mendelsund Having this token of wisdom as a guide, I read The Stranger for the first time in long time. As pages went on, I was shocked how foolish I had been assuming that relying on my memory from having read the book in high school and some help from Spark Notes would be sufficient to capture the essence of the manuscript. Each page and chapter was incredibly dense with symbolisms and motifs; by the end, I had a number of different angles to approach from.
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“I think of a book jacket as being sort of like a visual reminder of the book, but it’s also a souvenir of the reading experience.“
RESEARCH Rayographs, Man Ray
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RESEARCH Having Guts Always Works Out For Me, Stefan Sagmeister
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RESEARCH ABOVE
OPPOSITE
Book jackets by Peter Mendelsund
Notes from reading The Stranger
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02 DISCOVERY DISCOVERY
The discovery process was far from linear as I went back and forth between steps of the process to re-evaluate, re-experiment, and ultimately to refine the direction of my theme. I deliberately started off with a material experimentation before I thoroughly reviewed the book, just so that I could have as unbiased of an exploration as possible in approaching a variety of materials. At a crafts store, I grabbed whatever material I thought was even remotely possible to make into physical type, which included a rubber panel, wires and Styrofoam blocks and head. Just to get a gist of how type in the physical form could interact with its environment, I cut out letters set in Helvetica out of Styrofoam blocks. I noticed the distinct dimensionality of the letter blocks that was unique to existing in the physical world. I was compelled to explore with elements that could accentuate this quality. I ended up experimenting most extensively with light, with which I was able to evoke a spectrum of moods depending on the intensity of the light and the depth of the shadows the light created.
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After getting a sense of the materials I could use and elements I could potentially develop further, I revisited the book. As the challenge of the prompt was to design a visually captivating book jacket that also captures the essence of the book, revisiting the book was imperative to the discovery process. Fortunately, The Stranger was a short enough read for me to fully reread the book rather than rely on the Spark Notes version online. As I pulled quotes out along the read, I was able to extract the theme and mood that most stuck out to me. The words, “sterile” and “detached” particularly echoed in my mind as the protagonist exhibited a complete emotional detachment throughout the book, perpetuating a sense of estrangement.
DISCOVERY Material exploration round 1
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DISCOVERY Material exploration round 2
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DISCOVERY Material exploration round 2 continued
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DISCOVERY Material exploration round 3
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DISCOVERY
I was able to delve into a more guided experimentation of materials as I now was aiming to evoke a specific mood. To generate a sense of sterility, I explored an extremely minimalist treatment of the physical type. In doing so, I focused on elements that hinted at the physical type existing in space, such as the shadow and the way light interacted with the object. My choice of Helvetica for the letter blocks throughout the initial material exploration was for the purpose of using a “default” type so as to minimize the formal varibles. As the idea of “sterility” became refined through the experimentation, however, this choice of type ended up being the most fitting for the sense of detachment from any excessiveness that I wanted the cover to evoke. On the other hand, though I enjoyed the eerie texture of the closeup pictures of the Styrofoam blocks showed, I eventually let go of the material since even the texture seemed like an extra variable that was not imperative to the concept.
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Ultimately, I created letter blocks out of clayboard, and spray-painted them with white. I coated with a gloss finish multiple times to create a particularly plastic look, to further strip them from any sense of human or organic touch. With the more refined forms of the letters available, I photographed the letters from a number of angles under a number of different lighting intensity, which allowed for a thorough exploration of levels of dramaticness. Editing the photographs turned out to be a critical component of my physical type in creating a near surrealistic level of sterility with my letters. I mostly vamped up the black/white level and contrast to achieve a crisp and clean shadow. Such a great pool of photographs allowed for a variety of compositional exploration of the jacket layout, as depending on how the letter blocks were photgraphed, different opportunities opened up for how the elements could feel balanced in the composition.
DISCOVERY Making of the letter blocks
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DISCOVERY Formal exploration of the physical type
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DISCOVERY Compositional exploration of the book jacket layout
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03 REFINEMENT REFINEMENT
The refinement stage really came down to fine-tuning the secondary text of the book jacket, which included the author’s name and the information on the book flaps. Because the entire cover was formally and typographically rigorously minimalist, even one slightest change had a considerable impact on the balance of the overall composition. For exmple, during one of the group feedbacks discussing one of my earlier iterations, it was brought up that the change in case between the title and the author name took away from the strict visual language. Especially as I could not justify the change in case, there was no real reason why I would add another variable to my deliberately minimized layout. Some of the parts I paid especially close attention to were the formal relationship between the texture and the placement of the texts on the two flaps, and that between the author’s name on the front and the book title on the spine. The font weight and casing of the text significantly contrib-
In producing the actual book jacket, I spontaneously tried a mock-up on Mylar. I was pleasantly surprised with how plastic the texture of the cover felt, which I thought conveniently highlighted the kind of mood I wanted to evoke with the design of the jacket. After deciding to print on Mylar for sure, I had to go back and bolden all of the text since the translucency and the plasticness of the medium made the ink not print as legibly as on regular paper.
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uted to the texture of the text. With a conscious effort to minimize the variation of type treatment, I kept everything on the outer jacket all caps, tracked out. After a couple of iterations, I saw that because of how the physical type sits at the right upper corner of the cover, it made more sense compositionally to place the rest of the elements of the cover on a grid with margins slightly tighter than traditiona ones. This idea transferred over to the grid I used for the flaps.
REFINEMENT
Final
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REFINEMENT
Final
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04 CRITICISM CRITCISM
During the joint group critique, my book was one of the books not many were familiar with, which made their first impression of the book a valuable reflection of the effectiveness of my design. It was encouraging to find that the formal elements of the design made people feel a sense of estrangement and alienation. Though I am generally happy with how the final product has turned out, I still feel unsure about the way the quote sits on the inner flap.
REFLECTION ON PRACTICE
37
NURSERY RHYME
JEE KIM
WORD & IMAGE 2