CDF Project 5: Booklet
Booklet of lyrics and samples from various songs off the album Madvillainy by MF DOOM and Madlib.
Ideation
I wanted to make a book of an album because I wanted to make a piece that accompanied and was influenced by music. I decided to do Madvillainy because of the duality of the album’s artists that would work well with the two page spreads of a book. Madvillainy is a joint effort between a rapper and a producer, so I chose to explore each of their contributions to the songs off the album. Each spread would be one song with MF DOOM’s lyrics on the left and Madlib’s samples on the right. That meant that there would be two layouts for pages that I needed to figure out.
Layout
Lyrics
I chose to layout the lyrics in a single center-aligned column to evoke how poetry is usually presented. Adding more columns made it feel like more of an article than a song. However, because some of the songs were quite long with only a few words per line, I chose to have a very tall aspect ratio for the book. I think it effectively highlights how many words MF DOOM was able to fit in these songs that are generally under 3 minutes. It also
Samples
Because each of the songs had a wide variety of number of samples, I needed to figure out a grid system that would work for different numbers of elements. I chose a 2 column grid that allowed elements to stretch across both columns. This way, if a song only has 1 or samples, it can still take up enough space on the page to not seem empty.
Style
The style of the book was heavily influenced by the album art. I stuck to a grey background with orange highlight colors just like the cover art. For the lyrics and rhyming words, I picked bright colors to evoke real life highlighters. I liked how it looked a little overwhelming because I think listening for his rhymes can have a similar effect.
Results
