Collage inspiration

I had difficulty bringing the images of architecture and art together throughout Megans book as I struggled to see much relation between the images. Therefore to merge the idea of art and architecture together I decided I wanted to make my own kind of art work to feature in the book. I looked into different kind of architectural collages and drawings done to emphasise the shapes of certain buildings. The two examples above are by a photographer called Alexey Bogolepov who is based in St Petersburg, his work focuses on the architecture and ideology of modernism.
I like how simple his work is and the fact that the red geometric shapes overlaying the image don't distract from the actual photos.
























Some of my favourite graphic design work has come from Bauhaus, this collage in particular is by Paul smith who created this along with a series of other collages in response to a brief which was to create six bauhaus-inspired images to be sold in the Barbican shop. I love how simple this collage is and how much blank space there is around it, it has room to breath and I think that's what makes the collage so good. It's simple in a nice way, not in an unfinished way.


















A similar collage to the other is this one by Rebecca Rumble, a London based art director who works in video, animation, audio, graphics and photography. I love how busy this collage is and the fact their is so much going on yet it doesn't look over the top. I think this style is more suitable for my idea as I want to feature multiple buildings/ landmarks from certain areas therefore would feature multiple buildings much like the collage above does.



















Instead of overlapping cut out buildings I thought that cutting out snippets of the buildings and creating a pattern with them would be a nice idea, similar to this book cover displayed above. I think it adds more mystery to the place and encourages people to visit it to see what it really looks like.

Design for print terminology

Krakow Bike Tour

As Megan's idea is to create a publication that makes the art and architecture in Krakow accessible by bike I chose to do some research into other bike tours available. Below are a few of the ones I came across and in my opinion they are fairly expensive especially if this was a family of 4 they would have to spend over £80 therefore the book would be a good, cheaper alternative.

Most of the tours focus on the history of Krakow which again makes Megan's idea unique as her tour will focus on the art in Krakow rather than the history of it.

To get some ideas for designing I looked at the patterns found on bikes and the prints/ textures they could possibly produce.

I thought the prints created by bike wheels would be nice to develop on and possibly use within my design for the book, it's a subtle way to reference a bike ride without having to use a cliche bicycle illustration. I thought they would make a nice 'journey line' flowing throughout the book to show the route of the bike ride which could feature along side the distance of each location away from the city centre. 

The inspiration from this comes from a book I have called 'Britain's Lost Railways' which is a book about the old, beautiful railways in Britain that have been destroyed and no longer exist. Here you can see the line running across the bottom of the page which has a pinpoint that suggests a location, this point moves across the page throughout the book and eventually ends up on the right hand pages. This creates a journey throughout the book which relates nicely to the fact that the book is about trains/ relating to travel. 

Krakow Street Art

There is a lot of street art in Krakow, much of it is related to the Jewish identity particularly in Kazimierz (the jewish quarter). The artist Kuba uses street art as a symbol of regeneration of the city, his art work of Gene Kelly singing 'I'm Happy Again' relates to how the city is still recovering from the horrors of WW2.

However some murals take on a more educational tone such as this one displayed bellow which was created to encourage people to read more. Graphic designer Aleksandra Toborowicz created a mural to represent a book case which features many classic polish novels. Each book title is written in a different typeface to create a typographic collage, it was created using techniques such as stencils, free hand an calligraphy. 

https://freewalkingtour.com/krakow/tours/free/street-art/

There is even a free street art tour available to book which is 2 hours 45 minutes long, it is designed to inform people of the stories behind each piece of graffiti and to make people appreciate it more. 

http://www.travelingisaverb.com/street-art-in-krakow/

Typesetting

What is it ?
The composition of text by means of arranging physical types or the digital equivalents. Stored letters and symbols are retrieved and ordered according to a language.

The line- Reading Process
As you read your eyes spring jerkily along the lines. These movements are known as saccades, and they alternate with fixed periods lasting 0.2-0.4 seconds.


Typography- 3 elements
The letter: the individual character/ glyphs and anatomy.
The word: how these glyphs fit together.
The line: combinations and arrangement of words in a body sequence.

The history
Using letter press, very time consuming.

Now
Using InDesign, a lot quicker
Digital tools- font choice, pt size, metric or optical kerning, leading, tracking, scale and skewing options.

Principles-

Hierarchy, type can be used to create a hierarchy such as having a bold heading to signify its importance.

Alignment,
Left aligned ranged left with ragged right edge
Justified text - clean and classic
Centred and right aligned, hard to work with and look nice very rarely used
'rag' is the irregular/ uneven vertical margin, usually goes in out in out in out to the end. (even rag)

Paragraphs,
indented
full line break

Letter spacing (leading)
refers to the distance between the baselines of successive lines of type.

Tracking (same as leading but horizontal)
refers to amount of space between a group of letters.
Rules: don't go below -40 or above +40

Kerning and pairs
- the distance between two letters however some pairs of letters need specific kerning to bring them closer together such as AV Ty

Hidden Characters
Invisible characters such as returns, spaces and tabs. Only shown when you have 'show hidden characters' on. They indicate the structure.

Line length
Efficient reading depends on comfortable line length usually 40- 75 characters/ 7-12 words.
An overly short line length causes a more extreme and ugly rag in a body of text.

Widows and orphans
words that are left alone at the end of a paragraph/ sentence. Avoid where possible.
To get rid of one widen or shorten the tracking.

Dashes and spaces
Hyphen - used for hyphenating words (check-in)
en dash - shows a range e.g. London – Glasgow (slightly longer than a hyphen)
(ALT & - = –) can be used as a bullet point
em dash - shows interruption in speech and can also be used to show a pause.
(shift alt & -) —

http://www.thepunctuationguide.com

Rivers
the white gaps in typesetting. Usually found in justified text

Baseline Grid
everything has to fit on the grid regardless of size, aligns all text to a vertical grid.




Anthony Burrill Letterpress
A practice for everyday life




Typesetting Task:



Ideas:





































A square, bold, block of text to replicate the description of his father.





Making the title smaller to highlight the importance of his father and his dominant role.



Creating a hierarchy to show his father dominating his mother. Showing her insignificant role in society, she is described as 'wife of the above' on her tombstone therefore isn't important enough to give a decent description of her role in society is to be a submissive wife.

Mini Crit 9-10-17

Me, Jasmine, Hazel and Megan decided to have a mini crit between us to help us tackle any problems and get some advice from each other.

My problem was how to combine this idea of art an architecture without just taking the easy route and simply placing the images side by side throughout the book. I wanted to some how layer the images up and have some overlapping pages showing snippets of different parts of the city in contrast to different pieces of art work from there. However I was unsure how to do this therefore I asked the girls for some advice.

The advice I got was very simple but useful such as:
cutting geometric shapes out of some of the pictures and collaging with these
cutting out parts of a building such as the windows and putting a patterned piece of art work in the background.
playing on the art VS architecture and having pages of building collages and pages of art collages.
possibly look into Jewish art and see how this could relate (because a lot of the areas megan looked at are in the jewish quarter)

From this I decided to look at creating a collage for each specific area of Krakow Megan has looked at:

Town hall/ market square
(collage to consist of 2 x buildings 1x art)

Szpitalna 15
(2 x buildings)

Kazinmierz - old jewish quarter
(3 x building 1 x art)

Hevre- old jewish prayer house
(1 x outside 1 x inside)

street art in the jewish quarter
(3 x art)

Museum
(2 x building 4 x art)

Vistula River
(x 2 )

MOCAK
( x 4)

Tyniec
(x2)

Victionary Guidebooks

When looking for some guidebook inspiration in the library, I came across one of these books by Victionary. I like their unique take on something that's traditionally boring, despite them all following the same layout they all look different. Each book features a bright pop of colour and this colour scheme continues throughout the whole book.  Not sticking to the usual places all guidebooks recommend, Victionary has visited every city they have published a guidebook for so they can write about their own personal experience. Guiding you to the creative scene and lesser known restaurants/ bars, the CITIx60 guidebooks are perfect for those who want a true experience of the city. Each book point you to 60 hangouts loved by 60 starts of the cities's creative scene, from amazing architecture, art shops and markets. All features artists are current in the field they work in.


http://www.victionary.com/shop/page/2/?s=CITIx60&search#038;search




The front cover of this book is very interesting and doesn't give much about the content away. I like the use of layering and the strip of white that runs around the outside of the book to emphasise/ make it easy to see what city the book is about. The illustrations are very intricate and exciting to look at which is consistent throughout the range of CITIX60 books.



The inside of the book follows this peach, grey and navy colour scheme which was visible on the front cover. I think this is a nice touch as it brings the whole book together. The handwritten text at the top of the page gives it a more personal feel which is fitting as the book is based on their own experience of each specific city. Having information to read before you visit the place is also very useful as it gets you ready and helps plan your trip.





Breaking things down into a top 10 makes it easy for the reader as they can just skim through it quickly. The illustrations also make the page fun  to look at as they give you some sort of insight into what London is like and what to expect. Again the colour scheme is repeated with just small hints of peach being used in the illustrations.




The peach paper is repeated here along with 5 other colours which are associated with the individual categories found in the book.



The introduction to each section is set out really nicely and gives a brief introduction into what they reader can expect. However I don't find it unusual enough and feel it could be done in a more unique style like the beginning of the book is.



The inside pages are again a bit of a let down as they are very stereo typical of a guidebook. I think the beginning of the book is a lot stronger in terms of design than the rest of it which is a shame.



However it does still have some nice features such as the maps included in the back which are very simplistic but also typing with the colours used for each category in the book.




It also contains a few pages for notes which I think is a useful thing to have as when you visit a place you often notice things you want to remember for next time such as nice hotels, restaurants and shops.