Baseline
Baseline is a publication solely dedicated to type. It sets out to reflect all aspects of type, including its design, history, use and links to the creative world. Baselineʼs content is deliberately varied, with its editorial content taking a very open stance valuing originality of thought, while still giving due weight to academic research. Baselineʼs visual style is very holistic; which stems from itʼs firm belief that design and layout should spring from, and be in balance with the contents. Through this book I shall guide you through my working and development process, in designing a new cover design for Baseline Magazine. My response shall be based around my concept of incorporating words and letter forms as pictures themselves. In the spirit of past issues, I want to experiment freely with the shape, colour, and texture of letterforms and the space they occupy. My cover design shall result in an ʻimageʼ and the appropriate inclusion of the usual cover information, including title, date and editorial content.
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Initial Responses To begin my responses were quite dry and dull they really did not stimulate me. With these images I didn始t feel that spark to encourage me to carrying on developing my ideas.It was only a matter of a few hours after developing these that I completely scraped this concept and decided to start completely a fresh.
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Out in the World Luckily I stumbled upon the idea of capturing letterform away from the page, out actually in the world. This created a satisfying series of photographs; which developed a range of responses, whose results were varied from very direct to more obscure.
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Escape The Page
Finally my ideas were in full flow really starting to take shape, I loved the direction in which they were going. However it was actually an interview with Milton Glaser that really changed everything; his design for quaderno with the perspective grid pushed me in a new direction. I developed a new theory of allowing text to actually be free from convention, in effect escape the page. I took pictures that I felt had a connection to classic quotes through the mood of the piece. I developed this concept from wanting the text to not be so constrained, as well as to incorporate the idea that a photo says a thousand words so why not include a more directed textual content.
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Dante
I chose the quotes by Dante and Shakespeare as my final images to work as a pair depicting both an inside and outside environment. 12
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Shakespeare
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