Process Book: The Unseen, Seen

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the process a series in discovery, research, refinement & criticism

MOLLY MAGNELL

VOLUME III: THE UNSEEN, SEEN

CAPSTONE I: FORM & FUNCTION

FALL 2017

SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS AT WASHINGTON U. IN ST. LOUIS

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the unseen, seen Molly Magnell

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the research

Molly Magnell

concept

I’m really fascinated by Internet culture, and people’s tendencies to behave differently online, which lead me to Lindy’s podcast on her experiences with a traumatic Internet troll.

Like her, I’ve never heard of a scenario where a troll willingly admits they were in the wrong, so I was moved by the piece and Lindy’s powerful narration.

I was initially stumped on imagery and how I would treat it—I started looking at computer glitches and other elements that reminded me of “digital fury” and “fried images” caused by too many iterations of edits that mess with the levels and saturation.

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Digital covers for Wired UK’s May 2011 issue on failure.

One of the big themes I discerned from the podcast was the act of unmasking the person behind the screen—I was thinking a lot about the layers of removal between the Internet persona and the real human typing these threatening messages. I related this metaphor to the process of mixing together RGB values, where a message gets transmitted differently through several different layers of color to create an image. Sometimes these layers warp or misalign creating very interesting effects that are only a product of digital manipulation.

I wanted imagery and treatment to have a very digital feel to place the reader in a digital space.

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From Rachel Denti’s zine Everyday Thoughts on Everyday Life

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Initial research on ideas, concepts, and how I could marry these ideas to design decisions on the page.

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the discovery

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Some edits I made by splitting the RGB channels on a black and white image and manually altering the positions of the color layers.

I did some tests breaking images apart into different channels and printing each color on a sheet of transparency to physically manipulate the channels to see how I could distort the colors.

These discoveries lead me to experiment on what kind of content is hidden or present through the screens. Inspired by Stefan Sagmeister’s Made You Look book cover, I started experimenting with hiding messages behind filters to separate the troll’s online behavior to his actual thoughts when Lindy interviewed him to get to the root of his insecurity.

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Top Left: I took a page of type, broke the file apart and split it into separate RGB files. I turned each file into its own bitmap layer and reordered the red, green, and blue layers to create a richer background texture. I was testing ways I could mimic the RGB channel split effect that produces all the colors we can see on screens.

Bottom Left: Digital studies looking at the clarity of type through different bitmap settings.

Bottom: Stefan Sagmeister’s Made You Look. As you pull the cover out of the red film sleeve, the happy dog disappears as the angry red dog becomes visible.

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Studies where I physically manipulated the layers and then scanned them on a copy machine.

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Happy accident that happened from a bypass tray misfeed on transparency paper.

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Early direction to print bold type on neon paper to make an “aggressive zine.�

Next: my first experimentation with ASCII text

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Typefaces options I considered from Fontstand

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Top: Typecon Poster Bottom: Fig Sans, Fig Serif, and Fig Script by Process Type Foundry

I did a lot of research on typefaces for my book. For my body copy, I settled on Menlo, the monospace font that’s used in Sublime Text, a popular coding program. The header font is VCR Mono. The jagged low-res qualities of the old school font personally remind me of “internet fury.”

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Images run through the ASCII generator I used

I did a long series of tests trying to figure out how to incorporate reveals behind sheets of acetate. I started with overlapping text but it was clearly visible behind the pieces of clearlay.

I studied Sagmeister’s book more closely to look into how he treated the two images. I found that I needed to diffuse words and images by breaking them into less solid parts.

After a series of bitmap tests, I realized I could capture the same effect by converting images into ASCII art—an early form of digital art where people use letterforms’ densities to simulate halftone treatment to imply light and shadow.

The generator I used gave me some customizable options, and I found that setting the character per line to 320, the font size to medium, and displaying the type as “black on white” balanced legibility and invisibility behind the red screen.

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For a while I was unsure about imagery, and initially was going to stick to just 8bit style icons that echoed moments in the transcript.

After doing more research on Lindy and her story, I found a few photos of her and her father that I wanted to include.

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My favorite icon of the set.

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I made the decision to add in tweets from the end that are from Lindy’s actual account. I was a bit saddened to learn that she deleted her account after years of harrassment. While I understand her decision, I felt it was really powerful that her confidence and outer toughness diminished over time, so I chose to include it as an epilogue to what seemed to be a cheerful ending.

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the refinement

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I did a lot of refinement to the type because I’ve never worked with a monospace typeface before, and there were a lot of manual adjustments I needed to make. I learned a lot about the nitty-gritty settings in paragraph styles and how to adjust the spacing between words. I put a lot of effort into changing my underlying grids to allow for more space for column lengths, and then ragged my type to fit well on the page. I also went back and forth a lot between the right density and settings of the ASCII text to balance legibility and the reveal with the screen.

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the criticism

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After a long series of test prints on the Bixby printer, I had finally found the perfect opacity balances for pages where blue and red images overlayed each other so that each could be read separately with and without the transparency sheet. After printing on a new type of paper at Hi/Tec, the reds printed differently and I believe the different paper undid some of my adjustment work. Now lifting the red screen feels less like a major reveal since you can see some of the red image coming through. Some of the underlying text could have also been more powerful if I had written some of my own content of pulled from outside sources to have text that divulged the more vulnerable side of the Internet troll.

I also got feedback that my binding felt too sterile and could be misinterpreted for a medical journal. I wasn’t completely satisfied with the binding in the end, but I didn’t have too many options since the clearlay couldn’t have stuck with the other sheets in a perfect bind, and the I also couldn’t easily poke holes through the sheets to do any sew stitching.

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This book was written and designed by Molly Magnell during the Fall semester of her senior year in 2017 at Washington University in St. Louis. These five books exist as a catalog of the process and design thinking that went into the work she made during her design capstone titled Form and Function taught by Professor Chrissi Cowhey.

This book was typeset in: Diversa Soft Serif, 35 pt./ 42.5 pt. leading for the cover; 24 pt./ 28 pt. leading for the chapter headings; 118 pt. for the chapter numbers Quadraat Regular, 9.5 pt./ 12 pt. leading for the body copy; 8 pt./ 9.75 pt. leading for the captions with a 1pt. rule.