A Book about Freedom
Book
2017
Individual Project
About the project
Choose any piece of my own — short story, expository, children’s, poetry, interactive, fiction, non-fiction — or create something new. With it, we will create a bound book (both text and imagery) that matches and enhances the content. Images should ideally be my own and can be photographs, illustration, graphic or abstract. In class, we have covered a few different methods for illustration including sketching, the pen tool, and using type as image — all of these are at my disposal, as well as any other techniques my might want to explore.
In this project, I will incorporate your knowledge of typography and grid systems, and make appropriate design decisions based on the content. The form this book takes should be directly informed by the content. The audience is both the class and possibly a future employer. This piece will serve as an important exploration of visual and verbal interaction. It’s important today more than ever to be highly literate in both realms, and this project will exemplify my unique ability to combine the two. Designers play an important role in using both words and images to create meaning.
Project Progress
Before we started project 5, I was inspired by a conversation I overheard between professor MacKenzie and my classmate about her ideas for project 5 — a book about all turquoise objects. Wow, isn’t that amazing? A book with all possibilities. Around that time I was fascinated but also confused by the term “freedom”, so I decided to explore it through this project.
That night, I did some thinking, and the first idea that hit me was “money.” More specifically, the quote from Marilyn Monroe’s song “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.” The typeface was meant to be like a propaganda font. I wasn’t quite sure what my theme was by then. Mostly I wanted to create a sense of irony. I started to find diamond background pictures on Pinterest. Unfortunately I couldn’t find an ideal one, so I expanded the idea to all items that represent glamor, richness, and glory. I found these three green marble pictures that worked well together. As for the arrangement of the middle one, I didn’t do it deliberately. I wanted to make the middle one pop more, therefore the white frame was added.
For the seemingly random (which they are, intentionally) white lines at the background, they were inspired by the picture on the left. Before I started everything, I was just playing with the frames and rotating them to create motion. So I just threw two frames in the back ground and the result was surprisingly good. They helped filling the awkward blanks and also created a sense of randomness — freedom.
After finishing the background, the corners seemed a little empty. I found pictures of diamonds and pearls and photoshopped them to vector pictures. To make them stand out even more, I arranged them in different sizes. US dollars and coins were added to the conners of the page as well to complete the collages on this page.
For the front page, I found this black and white underwater picture because I thought it fit the theme pretty well. I used Didot because I wanted to create a magazine look for the book and since project 3, I’ve been obsessed with this typeface since it carries the sense of elegance.
As everything started to work together, the structure of this book got clearer. I wanted 3–4 different topics on freedom, and before each topic there should be a whole page of controversial quote. Version 1 is just a giant quote on plain white background, which seemed very raw but effective because people would stop for a while and think. Version 2 focuses more on the contrast between two pages. All the white dots on the left page were supposed to be diamond-like stars, but since the resolution of the picture was low, the printout didn’t turn out very well. Didot was used on the left and La Belle Aurore on the right because I wanted to explore handwriting typeface to create a sense of originality in some sense. I ended up combining the ideas from both version.
On the right side of the collage spread, I decided to bleed the middle picture and extend the lines from the frames. I knew I wanted black and white pictures (of me) in a polaroid frame there so I first found a good substitute for that. I would also write down my thoughts, either short thoughts, poets, or quotes from other people that I agree with so that the right side of the spread is all about what I think on the topic while the left side is a more controversial, or conventional way of thinking. I aligned the text box with the middle picture in a 90 degree fashion so things are like rotating. Some “free” lines were threw in the blank spots to create a sense of chaos — freedom.
Going off with the “rotation” idea, I decided to rotate the central picture page by page so it would have motions. I also tried to explore more probabilities of translating “freedom”. However, they all look like outlier compared to my main style, so I ended up not using them.
In mini-critique, professor MacKenzie suggested me to push the limit of the quotation spread. I looked through a lot of quotes about money and finally found one concise but interesting. I separated the sentence in two different pages to create a pause where people could stop for a while and think. And I found a picture from Pinterest that matches with the quote perfectly.
With similar arrangement and style as the first collage spread, I made the spread for the second topic — drugs. On the left, I photoshopped out heroin, LSD mushrooms, and weeds from other pictures and made collages. The picture in middle somehow fits the theme and color scheme very well.
The third topic came to me naturally — feminism. I had a lot of thoughts in my mind but just didn’t know how to express them, so doing collages was one of my ways to address the issue. All the collages are symbols of advocation of feminism — hairy legs, middle fingers, women on uterus crucibles, and uterus giving a finger.
Finally, the last topic got me thinking for a while. I was debating on doing either political correctness and sex, and I chose sex because I might have more to talk about it. The picture I found in the middle was very aggressive, even might be a little offensive. The collage items are cherry pie (referring to vagina), sexy lips, squash (which looks like vagina), and the apple in the Bible because sex is seen forbidden and dirty in the Bible.
Since all other topics use collage picture for the middle picture, I replaced the green marble with gold foil picture with this picture on the left and got rid of all quotes on this page. I moved coins to the left so that leave room for the right side.
I found these three strong quotes and aggressive collages (especially the one about sex) as introduction of each topic.
I paid attention to color scheme as well. The main color in order of the page is black + blue -> blue + green -> green + pink -> pink + purple + black -> black + white -> pink + black -> pink + teal + blue -> blue + purple + black. So when people are browsing through the book , the color transition would be smooth.
Since I wanted pictures of myself in the book, I asked my friend Grace Wong to take black and white photos of me with her film camera which has high resolution but also noise effect. Since I have a tattoo of “Liberte” on the back of my neck, I thought it would be a good idea to put my face as the front cover of the book and my back (with tattoo on it) as the back cover so everything in between (the content in the book itself) is “all in my head.”
With photos done, I used this picture as the background for credit page and it ties in with the effect of front and back cover very well.
Finally, just like project 4, we needed to combine front and back covers to do a book cover.
And that wraps up the process of my project 5.
