Editorial Take Process reflection 1
Table of Contents 4. Research 6. Discovery 16. Refinement 18. Criticism
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Research
The prompt of a “speech” took me immediately to Chimamda Ngozi Adiche’s “The Danger of the Single Story” as it had been on my mind for some time. Diving into this speech brought me to the narratives she presented in her speech. I looked up the authors that influenced her and what visual elements tied in with them such as childrens books, nigerian novel covers, and maps.
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Discovery
Stories equated to me as Children’s books at the most basic level, so I thought it would be interesting to try a square book. I began with thinking about pacing the stories within the speech out so they have their own spreads and moments. I played around with secondary texts, her stories, poems, quotes. Though, I realized that the stories themselves would be the pauses and layers I wanted.
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I made my own images for the book becuase I wanted to continue my exploration of how type and illustration can interact. In keeping with the theme of stories, perspective and layers, I collaged paper for the images. I isolated images from moments in the text so they were out of context of a larger image and only in the context of the story. I started with a broad pacing and a reintroduction for every story she recounted in the book. Then I had to compress it into the 15 spread limit. I accounted for a more varied pacing.
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Refinement
As I was refining, I unified the spreads a more, I wanted to call back to the first spreads and get rid of the ones that were not in keeping with the treatment of the type overall. I made sure I was playing with expectations of the single story by representing each story with the single image. Though, I didn’t want to play into the expectations, this meant that I stayed aaway from the images of Africa as they are often represented in America and Britain. I focused in on each image and their textures closely so the gave the idea of details, parts of a whole.
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Criticism
In finishing my book, I decided I wanted to do a coptic bind in a simple case bind hardcover with pockets. I wanted there to be a reveal to the book an its stories. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche talks about reintroducing stories starting with secondly so the book starts with secondly too. In redoing my book for final review I wanted to redo the rag as well as get rid of the transparency sheets and turn those pages into spreads. Overall, I’m pleased with my how the book reads as a “storybook” for an intended audience of adults who need to reframe their idea of “reality” and what people “are” back into stories. This way the words of the speech have the best opportunity to introduce new stories and perspectives to those who read it.
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Megan Stansbury Editorial Take Type II Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts Fall Semester, 2018
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Typset in Didot by Firmin Didot at Mergenthaler Linotype Company