Project Five
Grid, Style & Format
For this project we got to choose any piece of our own and create a bound book from it. The purpose of the project is to incorporate our knowledge of typography and grid systems to make appropriate design decisions based on the content that we have chosen. I decided to create a series of books about the process of building a booth for Carnegie Mellon University’s annual carnival. These books would fold out as posters depicting booths that I have worked on or am currently working on.
Inspiration
The main inspiration for this piece came from a booth I worked on last year. I had all the content from that year’s booth, including 3d models of the structure as well as flyers that we gave out. I thought it would be interesting to take the concept of the flyer and make it into a booklet that could also serve as a poster. I drew inspiration from Carnegie Mellon University’s Swiss poster collection and used online resources to find out how to properly fold a single piece of paper into a 6 page book.
Content
I ultimately decided that the content of the books would be spread across each spread, each with a unique and important step to creating a booth. Each book would have 3 steps each and be categorized as a major step towards the process. Furthermore, I wanted these books to be engaging to read, with a bit of humor. These books, along with their content are:
Ideate
Theme: What is the main idea of the booth? Are we on a spaceship blasting to mars or are we a battleship in dangerous territory? The theme of a booth brings everything together into a coherent idea
Experience: Do you feel the tension as the enemies approach your ship? Does panic set in as you realize you are one hit away from sinking? The experience of the booth gives everyone something that is memorable
Game: No booth is complete without a game. It is carnival after all! So… what is the game? And more importantly… what is the prize?
Plan
Interior: Time to answer the question that is on everyone’s mind: What does the inside of a museum on Mars 500 years in the future look like? What is the floor plan? The decorations?
Technology: It would be a shame if none of that martian technology made it into the booth. There is some pretty cool stuff like airlocks, holograms, lasers and… rotary phones? If used correctly, technology can enhance the immersion of the booth!
Exterior: There is an outside to a museum too! Something has to protect the martian people from all those harmful rays of the sun! The booth’s exterior draws in the crowd while keeping any unwanted space dust out.
Build
Move On: It has begun! An annual pilgrimage to the land that is known as the Midway. Each booth team has an organized time slot to bring all the things they need to their plot in preparation for build week.
Build Week: Ah yes, build week. The culmination of a whole year’s worth of planning. Midway goes from piles of wood to piles of wood that makes shapes that people can walk in to.
Tear Down: Woohoo! Carnival is over! Remember that thing that took a week to build? Yeah. You have 8 hours to dismantle that. Good luck have fun!
Sketches
For the first few sketches, I had not thought of the idea of having a book fold into a poster yet. I wanted to create a simple and modern looking book and tried to emulate that in my sketches. I tried to use the shape of our booth as well as images from previous booths and carnival themes in these sketches.
The next few sketches are after I thought of the idea of the folding for the book. The first image shows how the poster would be split into the book. Each rectangle is a page. The next few images were ideas in how information would be displayed on each page. I wanted to maintain the modern look to the book and possibly use different elements for each page that ultimately when unfolded, relied on a viewer’s imagination to connect the lines into the shape of the booth. I really liked the idea of displaying the wooden frames in my sketches as those are very important to the structural integrity of the booth as well as using hexagons as those were the shapes of many of the objects in our booth.
Digital Iterations
The very first digital iteration I made, I really wanted to play with the idea of having random shapes on each page that came together to make the shape of the booth. I had large blocks of color here and there, large blocks of text, and lines that represented frames. This was really all over the place and just too much too look at so I drifted away from this version rather quickly.
For the next few iterations of the poster/book, I tried get the hierarchy correct. I also added in the hexagons with little icons in them to display important aspects of the building process for booth. It was noted that it was hard to see the shape of the booth from the first poster and the colors did not match the overall celebratory feeling of carnival so throughout the next two iterations I added more color and ultimately decided to use lines to show the booth.
I ultimately decided to move away from the previous iterations as well. This time, I was more inspired by the Swiss Posters at Carnegie Mellon and decided to use transparencies to let everything come together. I particularly liked a Swiss Poster that had its text form a cross and decided to use that as the baseline for my poster. The folds of the book occur right where the spaces between the main words are, allowing me to use the cross as the titles for each section of the book. Each section was a spread and each spread had a main graphic and a paragraph describing what the section was. For this iteration, I did not let any graphics or text go over the fold marks, resulting in somewhat of a odd looking poster.
For the final spreads, I decided to make all the title text capital letters to enforce the cross look, increase the size of some of the graphics so they cross over the fold marks, and stretch and rotate the text so it did not look so similar from page to page. I also added an outline that was offset by a bit on to the graphics to make them pop more as well as a description on the bottom left corner of the poster that had the name of the booth and year it was built to help balance all the text and graphics around the poster. I cut and folded the books and created a band that went around the three books to bring everything together.
