OUGD404 - What is a book? Studio Brief 2 Study task 3

Today we were given study task 3 for brief 2 of this module. Firstly, we were given an introduction to modernist ways of layout and editorial design. We were shown that having the type justified is not always the best thing to do as it changes the tracking and forms rivers within the text. To fix this, you should align text flush left and move type between lines so that the rag doesn't look as jagged. We were also taught what orphans and widows were, and how to avoid them - usually using the same technique as smoothing out the rag.

Once we were given this information, we were split into groups and had to roughly half an hour to design a modernist layout approach to a short poem, and a postmodernist approach. 

We started on the modernist design, and everyone contributed some nice ideas. We came up with a rough sketch of what we wanted to produce in turquoise, something simple and functional. 
Next, we discussed postmodernism, and decided that the text shouldn't be uniform, using different typefaces, sizes and alignments. We also came up with the idea of layering the text so that it becomes slightly illegible. 

Once we had an idea of what we were doing, we got to work on the computer. We were able to easily adjust our type layout on here, so we had a play around. 

These are our final designs:

The modernist piece reads left to right, starting with the bottom paragraph, moving to the right of the page. We wanted to focus on the white space and emphasise it. We tried to keep modernist values within the layout of the page, but also in the second paragraph kept it true to how a poem should be laid out, as we thought as a modernist design it should be the most functional and easy to read. 

The feedback we got for this design was that it looked quite post modern. The way the paragraphs were arranged made it look confusing to read, which I agree with. 

With the post modernist piece, we decided to change the typefaces and overlapped the poem its self, using a central alignment. The feedback from this was that it definitely looks post modern, but there should be a reason for the decisions we made, rather than just doing it to fit the theme of post modernism. 

I feel like this session has helped me understand more about book layout and the ways in which modernism and post modernism work. I am more confident with taking ideas forward for the creation of my book and have a better idea of what works well within laying out text.