Final Reflection: Rodchenko Book Spreads
Disclaimer: I have tried multiple times to sit down and write this reflection and I know that I should have been consistent with keeping note of progress and iterations. I have been documenting as you will be able to see from the amount of photos I’ve taken below and some aren’t even included. I just haven’t had the time as much to write reflections on each step. Things were very fast paced here or most of my progress reflection was done in person with Stacie or Andrew and other mentors/classmates. I felt like conversations were the most important way of getting feedback and learning about my decisions this time around. But also, I’m still feeling emotional about the recent news and so this won’t be as well thought out as I’d like the reflection to be but I’m trying my best and putting down what I can. My mind has been slow and I’ve been thinking about other things unrelated to school work.
I hope this reflection doesn’t sound too all over the place. I’d like to start with reflecting on the start of my process. Going to the library helped me immensely. Reading about Rodchenko online helped get the ball rolling but it wasn’t until I took out a few books that were rich in content and artwork that I started to find myself feeling more invested in the project. I wanted to read more about him. I wanted to read more about other artists like Malevich and Tatlin. I had forgotten about how awesome the 4th floor of Hunt library is and how thankful I should be for the amount of resources we have on our campus dedicated to the arts and design. I know that that might not be totally common at other universities so we should take advantage of that while we’re here. I really had a lot of fun spending time alone on the 4th floor on some nights and weekends flipping through page after page on Rodchenko and reading about his contributions.
I was curious to see what Youtube had to offer for information on Constructivism and on Rodchenko. I always enjoy watching documentaries so this was a fun way to learn more about the topics.
When I started making connections that Rodchenko had influenced some of my favorite modern artists, I got really excited.
I took pages of notes on the things that I read and drafted a biography that would be later used in the first round of iterations for the spreads. As I started to build the narrative around telling the story of who Rodchenko is as a person, I simultaneously jotted down interesting facts and bits on Post-it notes to add to the classroom “Wall”.
Click here to preview the Medium post on the biography drafts I wrote at the start of this project.
I liked that we all contributed to this bigger wall. It was cool to see everyone’s Post-its that really brought out the accomplishments and in some cases, the personalities of their designer. It also helped me see in which areas, Rodchenko did the most. For example, he had quite the number of Post-it notes in the categories for “Influenced” and “Impacted”. He also had many under the categories for “Occupations” and “Collaborators.”
I think that if we had had more time to work with the Post-it information in class, then we could have made something really cool out of all the notes but given the time, we integrated what we could into the spreads.
Afterwards, Stacie wanted us to start thinking about information design. How do we make it easy for the reader to understand and make connections for themselves between the information that we’re giving someone? After reading about Lynch Diagrams and different methods of visualizing data/information, we set out to crafting our own.
To begin my process here, I drafted my ideas on a smaller tabloid sheet of construction paper. I thought about what mattered most out of all the information I had collected on Rodchenko. What was the connection I wanted to show? I saw that there were lots of parallels between what was going on in Russia socially and politically and the work that Rodchenko was producing. The politics of Russia affected how he and many of the other avant-garde artists were treated. Rodchenko’s career had grown at the start of the Russian wars because he saw it as an opportunity to redefine art. So I decided to do a vertical timeline with the life events of Rodchenko on one side and the events happening in Russia at the time on the other side. Hopefully in reading left to right, people would be able to read the fact about Rodchenko and then read about the context behind the information.
This didn’t really work out as well as I wanted it to because things trailed off to far out but also I realized that the bits of information I wanted to read last about Rodchenko (on the left side), was turning into the first thing read because I shifted it all the way over. This ultimately didn’t feel like it would work out well.
I changed my approach and tackled sectioning the information off into groups. Here each of the groups are numbered making it easy to navigate. There were call outs to further explain the information which I thought was useful. This version is better sinceI can fit more content in here but it still felt off somewhat.
I was again, able to fit a lot more content here. I just don’t think that it visually looked nice and of course more restructuring could have happened.
With the numbers at least you know where to look and how the flow of the page goes. But I guess if this was well designed, you wouldn’t need numbers. You should be able to read the page and know where to go from one place to the next.
I had fun working with Noah to annotate this page in class. We learned about landmarks, nodes, districts, etc. These are all elements that help build the content in a way that we can digest it easily. It was a good activity to do before we started our initial book spreads. Here’s a Medium post on the quick sketches I did on grids and layouts.
There were lots of things that I learned from the readings that we were assigned. I realized how much I didn’t know about the language and concepts that exist around grids.
I especially love the Scott McCloud readings.
When I started building the drafts of my spreads, I focused on what colors and fonts to use. I knew I wanted to do white and red on black pages. I wanted to have the only black pages in the book — something “anti”.
But what was the voice I wanted to convey through type? How could I define Rodchenko’s personality and find the font that expresses that essence? Here’s the Medium post I wrote on exploring fonts. A word that had come to mind initially was “serious”. I thought about whether or not I was going to want to use a sans-serif typeface or serif typeface. I defaulted to Palatino, the font I had studied for Dan’s mini communication design studio course. I thought it would work because it had unique aspects to it, is easily legible and has an air to it that commands attention of the reader.
I Googled around and found websites written about Rodchenko. I was pleased to see that this website too went with the color scheme of red, black and white. It was validating to see that and know I was headed in a good direction. I noticed they had used a serif font. It looked nice but I still felt like a sans-serif could do more for the voice I wanted to give off.
I looked at various fonts that were bold, black and square. For the first round of spreads, I used Bebas Neue even though I knew that wouldn’t be the final font choice. But at the time, I wanted to get feedback on the general gist of the font. The biggest problem was that it was quite thin but also, every letter is uppercase making it impossible to read for body copy.
Some design decisions: I had to set up a two column grid because Bebas Neue takes up so much space than most fonts. So often, a small paragraph would end up taking up the entire document page.If I used Bebas Neue, I wouldn’t have been able to include all the things I wanted to from the biography I had written up. That was a problem.
This also meant that I didn’t have much space for graphics. Plus, I wanted the quotes and call outs to really stand out, set in a large font size. I started playing around with the idea of overlapping text on image. This felt right given that Rodchenko did so much with photomontages in his time.
I think my confidence really went down when I put up these spreads next to the other ones in the class. I learned in a painful way, the importance of using the “right” font. The font here is so unfitting it makes the entire page uncomfortable to read. As a result of feeling like I started off on the wrong foot cause of the font, I was behind in terms of setting up a good grid and having a strong biography. I had wasted so much time because I started with a poor first try. I fell behind as other people moved on given that they were happy with their font choices, colors, grids, and overall layout.
At this point, I was feeling lost and set up a meeting with Stacie to discuss grids and fonts. I started looking into the history and context of when a font was created. Could I find any that were related to Russia or that same time period? Stacie recommended me to look at Gothic fonts because those fit the style I wanted but ultimately, I took to Google Fonts and found, “Khand”, which is the one I used in my final spreads.
It’s a fairly new font, made by the Indian Type Foundry and published first in 2014. Something really caught my eye about the condensed, tall letters and the way all the styles looked together. I particularly liked the gradation of thickness in Khand.
Once I got the font out of the way, I wanted to start anew on things. I drafted up another version of the spreads but I realized I was still struggling with placement of graphics and text.
Some pages had too much text while some others had too little. I wasn’t a fan of the way I set up the elements on the page because the negative space never ended up looking too great. Overtime, I was able to develop a better sense of what “looked” good and feel more comfortable with my design decisions.
I’m going to paste in here what I wrote for my final self-assessment. I highlight the important realizations I had at a turning point in the timeline of this project.
Final Self-Assessment
I learned so much about myself during this project. I experienced a great deal of self-discovery while working on these spreads. I took the time to re-evaluate who I am as a designer in the way I think, the way I work, how I see things and where I fit in comparison to my classmates. I think it’s clear that I really struggled throughout this project.
I was already terrified of grids and not having confidence in my own visual design abilities didn’t help the situation. In the beginning, I thought I was doing fine work and then when critiques came around, I realized I wasn’t catching on as well as other students did when it came to “seeing” grids, and negative space, etc. I guess this has to do with the fact that I didn’t read much growing up and I tend to look at digital web pages. Usually, the layout doesn’t have much white space and it saturates the user with image and text.
I started to doubt myself and felt like I was spending hours iterating over and over again on my spreads, but not feeling like I was going in any direction that was meaningful. What really helped me get over this feeling of defeat and disappointment definitely was the realization that I work a certain way and think a certain way that makes me different than other people in the class. And this applies to everyone else in the class too. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. Some people might be more naturally better at putting together web pages and some people might be more comfortable working within InDesign.
Often times, I found myself comparing my spreads to the people sitting around me and that really stressed me out. But in actuality, now that I’m reflecting on everything, I realized during the previous critique and during the final one, that they all should look and feel different for a reason! They should feel different because of the fact that our designers all made different work and were working/living in different time periods. There’s a reason why some people’s spreads look more conservative while others look digitized and modern. On top of that, of course the voices of ourselves and our designers bleed into the composition of the spreads. And then it was interesting to me that other people after the rough draft critique seemed to be feeling the same way, in having negative thoughts while I was past that hurdle and moving on to refining my work and tackling the spreads with a new perspective.
From then on, I really embraced Rodchenko’s personality and sort of gave myself tunnel-vision so that I only focused on improving my own spreads, not looking at others for comparison. And I was able to bring out a really consistent voice and color palette. I’m so happy with what I ended up doing with the cover too. A lot of people during the last critique made the observation that many of the title covers had large images of the designer. I didn’t like how some people wanted to change their cover afterwards for the sake of uniformity.
I ended up thinking more about ways to make my spreads stand out and I found that shrinking Rodchenko’s portrait made the most sense. I’m really happy with where I got to with my spreads. This was a really tough project for me but I’ve learned incredibly much about being comfortable working with grids (which I’m still not the best at but things are a lot better) and I’m a lot more comfortable with my own style when thinking about the context of how I fit in with my classmates.
Below are some of the iterations I made for just the cover image alone.
I eventually simplified it to just the tiny portrait of him. I want people to have to work to see all the details in the image!
Here are some more process images of what the spreads looked like after I put down a grid to follow.
These images below show the changes I made to the right spread. I changed the header from “Russia in Conflict” to “Also known as ‘Anti’” which is a lot more descriptive. That was something people noted at the final critique. Some people had generic headlines that didn’t prepare the reader for what to expect or draw them in.
These next few images showed my process in playing around with text over image and in breaking the grid. I ultimately chose to keep things pretty structured and in its own grid. Nothing overlapped in the final spreads.
Brief overview of my web design project:
I really enjoyed doing this part of the project. Working on websites definitely comes more naturally to me than working on spreads. I think there’s something about the fact that I can quickly test out and see what my code looks like just by refreshing the page. I like that instant feedback. I had prior experience to coding web pages so this also was a bit easier for me. But still it was difficult at various points. Setting up the grid was difficult and I also set up the foundation of my page differently than others as I used flexbox.
I kept the colors and voice consistent in my website. I translated many elements over to the web version. Most people thought they looked similar!
Andrew also noted that my website was one of the few (I’m not sure if I was the only one actually) who did a website with multiple pages.
My website opens up with a Vimeo video on Rodchenko. I thought that was a cool way to introduce someone to the site.
As you can see here, I used Khand again, large images, and the signature maroon/black/white color palette.
For call outs, I followed the style of my spreads and made those parts red.
I also threw in some cool animations. When you hover over the images on each page, they grow just a bit larger. When you hover over the big quotes, a red border appears around them. Also, people really liked the easter eggs I placed around the site like the animations. But also if you click on the footer, it links to my portfolio page. If you click on an image, it brings you to the source. This way I didn’t have to do a citations page. If you click on the quote on the first page I believe, which is from a book, it takes you to the book found in the Google e-library.
Also, I thought that the fixed, floating nav bar was a nice touch that is pretty unconventional. I haven’t really seen that done before the way that I did it. Thought that was pretty “Anti”.
Overall, I learned a lot from this project and developed a better visual vocabulary for grids, book layouts, web layouts etc. I want to continue to learn and get better at web design. This project really showed me that I love coding with HTML and CSS. I’m glad that I got to reach out to both Stacie and Andrew more during this project. I was able to talk to them both in class and privately whenever I felt like I needed advice or felt stuck. The “A-ha!” moment took a lot longer for me to get to this time around but once I did, I got a lot more invested in the project.
The key thing that was missing in the beginning aside from a strong font/visual theme was the lack of my own personal voice in the biography I had written for Rodchenko.
I probably rewrote my biography more times than anyone else did in the class. I actually found time to edit and add to my biography every single day. I constantly went back to the library to check out books. I spent so much time reading about Rodchenko. But in the beginning, the first few drafts of my biography sounded to textbook-like and very factual. At one point, I sat down and wrote the entire biography from scratch. I wrote it as if I was telling the story about Rodchenko to a friend. I left out a lot of details about the different roles he was assigned to by the government which seem important and maybe they are, but to me, they weren’t that significant because I could think of other things to say about him that weren’t dull.
So once I had a narrative that I personally cared about and felt like was my own, I got much more interested in making the spreads.
I ended up feeling really proud of my spreads although there are things I’d clearly change that comes with having more time and a deeper understanding but there are the little things that I’m proud of and that means the most to me. I’m glad other people seem to like it as well.
I’m glad that I finally finished this reflection and wrapped this project up. I’m looking forward to working with Deniz and Noah on the next one!
— Tiffany
