Project 5: Grids, Style, & Format
About the project
The final project for Communication Design Fundamentals is to create a bound book with almost any concept that we want it to be about. I made a booklet that introduces Pablo Picasso’s artwork, Three Musicians because I discovered through my personal experience that people usually found his work hard to understand and interpret, I wanted to make a book that will help people to appreciate Picasso’s work more by starting to understand his pieces through this small booklet.
Brainstorm
In the beginning, I wanted to make an album book about my friend’s cats, as they are really cute and I took a lot of pictures of those two cats, so I thought it would be cute to do so.
Over the Thanksgiving break, I went to MoMA in New York City with my friend. On the floor where Pablo Picasso’s works are, he seemed to be not as excited as I was. I asked why and he said he did not understand those artworks at all and it seemed pretty boring to him.
Thus, I gave up my idea on the cat album as I wanted to make something that is useful rather than being cute, even if just for one person. However, as I myself is not an expert in Picasso’s artwork, I had to go through many artworks of Picasso and pick one that is not too hard to introduce and relatively easy to understand. I stopped my steps when I saw this piece, Three Musicians, in the museum and decided to make a booklet of it because the name is pretty straightforward and it does not take too much effort to tell three characters in the art piece.
Materials
I first did a lot of research on this art piece and filtered out what I wanted to include in the booklet and what information to leave out. This process sounds easy but rather difficult as my booklet will be small so I won’t have much space to include a whole lot.
After my research, I concluded that several points below are considered important and should be included to understand it:
- This artwork was created in cubism style.
- The three musicians in the work actually refer to three people. Two were Picasso’s friends and one was Picasso himself.
- In Cubism, the subject of the artwork is transformed into a sequence of planes, lines, and arcs. In this pieces, flat, colored abstract shapes are used in particular.
- The viewer of cubist work must actively participate with the artist in making the artwork make sense.
- Possible strategies include reconstructing the subject and space of the work by abstracting out the different shapes, form or colors to determine what each one represents.
- People tend to overlook small details in the process of reconstruction the work.
From this information, I thought if I could abstract those shapes and color pieces out for the viewer, it might be easier for them to interpret the artwork as the process is lighter. Moreover, I should include who those musicians are and what musical instruments they are playing in the book so it is clearer what kind of musicians and who they are.
Mid-crit
For mid-crit, I came up the basic structure of the book, which includes the covers, the definition of cubism and spreads that introduce three musicians.
Front and back cover
For the cover, I went with minimalism as I wanted the cover to be clean and precise. Moreover, I wanted to give myself credit on making the book, so I put my own name and where I created this booklet corresponding to Picasso’s name and where he created the art piece, Three Musicians.
Definition of Cubism
The next spread is about the definition of cubism, which is the main style of the art piece. I also put the art piece on the right page, because I want readers to view the full picture first and then figure the details in small colored pieces later on throughout the book.
Spreads about the musician
The is the format for each musician. It is always made out of four pages. The first page is blank on purpose, so the reader could focus on the second page, which introduces what type of musician he is in the art by viewing his face and facial expression. The third page captures the shape of the musician’s body and attire. Whereas the last page shows the musical instrument the musician uses in the art piece.
For each page, I put on a small note on what each page is about and a couple of features that are unique to the object.
Final-presentation
From the mid-crit, I received many good suggestions and things I could work on, including ideas about the book cover and feedbacks like “I found myself understanding the art more but maybe you could include more into how those pieces come together”.
Front and back cover
For example, I was advised to use the Three Musicians as the front cover as I asked for how to improve my cover designs. Thus, for my final design, I took this advice and made the art my front cover, and the background of the art my back cover.
I found the design of the back cover rather unique because it tells the reader what to expect inside of the book by showing the profile of three musicians and a dog. I also adapted my mid-crit design choice by putting my name on the back cover. This time, however, I put “One Engineer” as the second line because I myself is an engineering major and found this corresponding to “Three Musicians” well.
Make it more concrete
From the mid-crit, I also received feedback about how all those small pieces helped them understand the art more but more information should be included to make all the small pieces come together to a big piece.
I found this feedback particularly valuable as the whole point of the booklet is to make people understand the art, but if that is how they felt after reading through the book, my book is not designed right. Thus, I started more researches on the piece to find what else I should include to make this book more concrete.
Where is it?
As I included the name of the city where this art was created on the front cover, I decided to include a picture of that city in the book.
I purposely made the description on the right 90 degrees rotated, because I wanted to add more interaction between the reader and the booklet, knowing the booklet will be small and light so it is easy to rotate.
Who are they?
In my mid crit, I only included the other musicians’ names without more details about who they were. As they were not as well known as Pablo Picasso, not many people learned about them before so it is hard to understand the concept. Thus, for the final presentation, I added three pages, each is about who they were and how they were connected to Picasso personally so they got to be drawn on the art piece.
As it turned out both of those musicians were Pablo Picasso’s friends and were also related to symbolism, cubism, and surrealism in different ways, which does explain more on why they were so close. One more small detail that I captured in the final version is that the monk in the art, which related to Max Jacob, who in fact entered a Benedictine monastery in the year this art was created.
What else are there?
As the name of the art suggests, there should only be three musicians in the art. However, there is actually one more character in the piece who is always being overlooked: a dog. I personally think this piece should be renamed to “Three Musicians and a dog” so that people will start to look for the dog and be more engaged when viewing this piece.
To capture this missing character, I purposely leave out a whole spread asking the reader if they overlook something and give out the answer on the right-hand side page, highlighting out the important nouns and having the dogs and tables on the next spread, so the readers could figure out where they are in the original art piece.
Conclusion
I really like this project because I get to discover some issues that are related to art and museum which I personally enjoy a lot. Throughout the process, knowing I am helping others by making a booklet, I found this project meaningful and exciting. I really hope more and more people could step into the museums, appreciate the great artworks that were created a long time ago and also find the work interesting and exciting but not boring.
After I showed my final booklet to my friend, he was so surprised that there were so many details all captured inside this artwork that he did not notice before. He said he would definitely pay more attention to art and try to figure out what the art is about next time he goes to a museum.
I guess that is really the best outcome I could ask for.
