Work Placement: Development 4

Second interview is now on InDesign and almost done. I had been dreading this task for weeks but thought today that it would be best just to get on with it. Because Harriet had already transcribed the last interview we did, it was just a matter of placing it in InDesign and as Finn had already made paragraph styles for each type thing we might need, I don’t even know why I thought this would take long, it actually went super quick. 

Summer Show: Further Development 3

Our first idea for the catalogue for the summer show was to make it into a zine thing from the poster so I made a more proper mockup of this using the actual poster. Did not like this thing at all to be honest as it looked too boring and I didn’t like folding the poster up because it felt like it ruined it a bit.

Work Placement: Outcome 1

Another thing to design is the interview pages for the magazine. I literally had no ideas for this and thought I would focus more on the text, deciding point size and look at leading and stuff. I also tried different column width to see how we could work the layout for this, being that the square size could be tricky to design to. 

Summer Show: Further Development 1

Continuing working on things for the summer show, one thing that needed defining was signage, or something to hang up inside or outside the studio to give some sort of information/ context to what that studio is about and who’s in it. I thought it would make sense to incorporate the hell tape type to tie it together with the poster and tried it small at first and then big but didn’t think either of the options really worked. The small type wasn’t interesting enough and the big type took over too much. 

Work Placement: Development 3

Back to the cover! After some feedback from Tom telling us the cover doesn’t read well and that it feels too composed and digital, I got back to thinking about it and decided to start over with the whole composition. I scanned the ink letters I had and printed them out in different sizes, cut them out and started to compose some designs on a piece of paper in front of me, taking photos as I went along. I tried some organised layouts, some messy, and them started cutting up the letters or gluing them down to a piece of paper and them crumbling them up. I tried to make something happen. But it wasn’t happening. I wanted it to look like the messiness of a cover of Emigre magazine but everything I did just looked boring. I began to realise that the whole process was starting to feel like a huge weight in my brain, it wasn’t fun anymore, I don’t like the name anymore and I don’t like the typeface.

Work Placement: Development 2

Okay so first hand rendered type thing didn’t work like I wanted it to. So I tried another variant. Using bigger tools. So I drew some more type with a biggie 50 pen and also with ink and a bigger brush. As I learned during one of the HotHouse workshops last summer show, ink looks great Riso printed so I thought I should try that out now as well. Again, using Avenir as a base, I made these letters:

Hand rendered type, Lisa 2018

Work Placement: Research 3

As the magazine needs to be Riso printed, we had to do some tests on the Riso. I find things always look more different than you expect after printing it on Riso so we made some tests for the cover.

Riso printed cover tests, Lisa and F.Kidd 2018

Work Placement: Development 1

I think my initial kind of go to format for the magazine was A4 (because the Riso prints A3 and that would make it easy to fold down and bind) but after getting the advise that a different format might make people more inclined to pick the magazine up because it looks different, I looked at others variations. We had decided that some form of saddle stitch or stapling technique would suit us best in terms of low cost in production and the relatively speedy way of it so I tried different fold downs from A3 but cropping it after to get a different format than A4. I really liked the long format in the beginning, because I associate a magazine with something being big and the narrow size made it feel bigger even though it was cut. So that was the size we settled on for a while and I made some more cover tests based on that format:

Match and Mismatch: Outcome 3

I worked a lot with the poster outcome of this project. After all the tests I did here I thought I might be done but after realising I wanted to use the image of the stretched bench for my publication, I didn’t want it to be visible in the poster as well. I was also starting to change my mind about the placing of the text. It clashed with the white line at the bottom too much and just didn’t sit well. Before all this though, I changed the typeface. I had started using Helvetica when making the tests just to kind of use something, but also started to like it. However, I thought I should look at other typefaces too, to see if there was something else I could use to fit better. I had recently found Gibson and thought that looked nice and kind of similar to Avenir, but when I placed it on the poster I instantly hated the way the “e” looked. It looks too evil, like someone is laughing ominously and the poster is dark enough without having a evil looking “e” in there. So Gibson had to go. But! Then I found League Spartan! And it fit perfectly. I love the roundness of the “b” and the bold strokes of the ascenders. I also tried to make the text a bit wobbly to take away some of the static-ness but didn’t like it in the end so let that go.

Match and Mismatch: Research 4

When thinking about how to design the postcards I realised pretty quickly that I can’t have anything too small as A6 is so small already. I thought about doing something with collage and texture and kind of abstract but felt after some time that that wasn’t the direction the overall project was going in so I should do something else. I thought about playing with the scale of furniture piece versus the small size of a postcard as well and thought it would be funny to do something that made the bench look like something you could hold in your hand and did some tests with me holding printouts of the bench. But it didn’t feel representative enough and although I embrace weirdness, this wasn’t a good kind of weird.

Postcard idea, Lisa 2018