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Candide Book

One of my main projects of work during the last year at university was to type-set Voltaire’s novel Candide. I’d read it during my French A-levels and enjoyed the fast pace of the narrative, the variety of characters and locations and the underlying theme/philosophies of ‘optimism’. I’m amazed it hasn’t been made into a film yet; Terry Gilliam could have some fun with it.

The point of the brief, type-setting a complete text, was to challenge us to work with a large amount of information, to test our ability to work out interesting consistencies in the text and to present the text in a relevant and original way.

I first noticed that the book was largely balanced in narrative and dialogue. Footnotes had also been included in the original novel so I wanted to bring them into the design and make them more appealing to the reader as I found it laborious sifting through the back pages for the relevant note in my own copy of the book.

I learned what I think is the most logical way of setting a new text. I paid no attention to page sizes or formats. I opened an enormous document on InDesign and focused on the text alone. I knew I had three units of information to work with — narrative, dialogue and footnotes (where applicable), so I used Latin text to simply play around with the idea of three text styles. How would they contrast? How many forms of contrast are necessary? If I give each of the three texts a position on the page, will that be enough contrast? How should footnotes look? Will they disrupt reading if I put them in the text? Could they run vertically on the page as a means to show the information addresses the reader in a different tone?

I like the fact that there are so many variables to type-setting. Every decision made should be reasoned but the further something can be pushed before it loses clarity or meaning the better it is. 

I began to work on the pages that would introduce each new chapter and felt it most suitable to do something a little more hands-on. I felt that using type a little more liberally may make a nice change against the very solid look of the narrative that I’d be developing.

I played around for a few hours over a number of days and eventually settled on using two typefaces, black ink, and a pale green paper. The paper would later inform the colour of the dialogue of the main character; I chose a dark purple/black which, I think, complements the chapter pages. The final 30 images work similarly to a timeline. The smaller letters represent characters mentioned in the chapter title and the larger letters suggest a location mentioned. If a character is leaving a location s/he is placed on the right side of the page, and the location on the left. If the chapter discusses how a character goes towards a new location, s/he is on the left and the location is on the right.

The final layout of the text and images informed one another. A grid was in place for the text of the book so this allowed me to justify where the character letters would sit on the chapter images. On the large chapter image below (5th down), for instance, the letter ‘C’ on the left begins the list of characters and its position lines up with the side and bottom of the text grid. Small details like this really help to tie everything together sometimes.

The final text layout was actually able to be fitted into an A4 book — giving us A3-sized images. So, going back to what was said before, it was best to deal with the text itself first and worry about the page sizes later. A final text hierarchy was used to break down the information into narrative, dialogue, Candide’s dialogue and footnotes.

Alan Fletcher: Work and Play

In response to Alan Fletcher’s London exhibition, a couple of years back, I got down some quick ideas as a reaction to the name of the show, Work and Play. Personally, I’ve only ever worn a tie around my head when I left sixth form at school; ah, the water fights…

Book cover

I found this book in the library at university and decided to scan its cover. There was just something very attractive to it; it reminded me of something I’d read — that a successful design is one whose elements do not affect its visual balance when removed. The accidental nature of its aesthetic also adds to its value, for me. The smudge of white paint gives it that tiny imperfection that all things ‘beautiful’ require.

Tentative explorations followed.

Distant childhood

Nosey neighbour

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Little brother

My unfortunate younger brother captured during my obsessive phase of using Illustrator. The colour of the hair is more or less accurate, by the way!

Sketchbook pages

A few pages from my sketchbooks — including a study of Manet’s The Dead Toreador.

Counter

Hanging around

Rashomon

One of many visual responses to the film Rashomon.

Tip: InDesign kerning

If you want to adjust the letter-spacing on something you have typed in InDesign you can use the alt key; place the cursor between the letters whose spacing you wish to adjust and, holding down the alt key, press the left arrow to delete space or the right arrow to add it.

Going to preferences>units & increments will allow you to alter the amount of space you affect with each press of the arrows. (Making the units smaller will give you more control over how much you change the spacing).

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Type hierarchy

Robert Bringhurst’s table is a useful guide to well balanced typography. If roman lower case is used, for instance, small caps, full caps and bold lower case may be chosen as further alternatives. Swash and sloped caps, though, should not be paired on its own with, say, roman lower case.

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Justified

I wonder if it is a result of lazy typesetters that many designers love to force type into rigid shapes; in my own typesetting experience I did find it easier to lock the shapes down if they were in a nice tidy block. The sheer number of occasions I’ve noticed type forced into a quadrilateral shape has baffled me.

The above posters by Kurvers and Wijdeveld are attractive on an aesthetic basis but reading them is another issue entirely. The difference between Wijdeveld’s Bind Werk poster and Max Bill’s work, below, in terms of typesetting is that Bill has not changed the letter-spacing in his text but his word-spacing. Bill has chosen to keep all letter-spacing and text sizes the same; where feasible, Bill begins text from the left and ends a line at the right edge of the box. He does not increase the text size to ensure a word ends at the right edge, nor the letter-spacing. His text box was clearly drawn to appease the subject of the poster (the cream-coloured area) and allows the orange circle to attract the viewer’s eye to its left edge.

An example of modern use of justified text is in the type design of Costa Coffee. One visit to a Costa café will no doubt give you square eyes. Justified text has clearly become a typographic style of the café’s visual identity but does not seem to serve a useful function. Mostly, the text of their sales messages appears to be forced into blocks and this sometimes abuses the nature of text sizes; a larger word is usually more important.

No doubt the frequency of instances today where text is forced into a quadrilateral shape (by text sizes, letter-spacing and word-spacing) is an off-shoot of the over-use of ‘centred’ text. ‘Typographic form must be organic, it must evolve from the nature of the text’ — Jan Tschichold.

Weegee

My favourites from the NY photographer