In The Mind Of A VisCom

Typography & Book Design in 2022 from Tasha Ray on Vimeo.

After reading the brief I made a few mind maps and jotted down a handful of things so I could get the brief clear in my head. I didn’t exactly come up with much else to go on though, it seems the only idea I had was to do something with pages and paper. I’m finding it really difficult to think of ideas which meet both aspects in the brief; my area of interest, and Viscom, I can either come up with a good idea for one or the other. I know that I want to do something with paper and pages, as this will represent my book design style, I did also think about over aspects of my work too such as print and ink. As I’m finding it so difficult I think my next step would be research.

The first brief was simply titled project 1, and the brief itself seemed to be almost as simple as the title. The General idea was to create a poster in our own style to advertise VisCom for students who were thinking of coming to university next year. Funnily I’ve found it really difficult because the brief is so broad we can do what we want with it basically and that made me totally lost, I hate being restricted but I guess having all the choices to can be just as daunting.

0 0 1 112 643 AUCB 5 1 754 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE

We begin indeed…

I always forget about the blog, but it has taken me a while to get back into the whole work think in general. But I’m getting there, slowly but surely. Our first day back was for pure introductive purposes, just to bond us all together, and confidence building etc. We were given a question, ‘should Oscar Pistorius run in the 2012 Olympic games?’ given ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and asked to come up with a good area or research to use within a debate. The debate did get a little bit heated when everyone really got into it. The idea I guess behind the whole debate being if we can fight for something that we may not have any interest in then we should be able to fight for our own work and ideas.

Tested the textured images out and I created some simple layouts, I really like these now think there a better match than all the different styles of what I had before. I want to look at either creating the whole book in this style or maybe even creating each poem in a different style. 

I had a tutorial yesterday and a critique today which was quite strange as there were two different responses to the exact same work. Usually when I get feedback there’s a similar idea but this time one told me to go very graphic with it and the other said stick to the illustrative style. I know that not all the pages were matching in style and everything was a little disjointed but I didn’t want to change anything till I had, had feedback. Not sure which way to go now though, I’m thinking more towards the illustrative path, it’s more of the style that I wanted to create with this book and within a career. So I need to cut up some material and look into added filters to make more of a textured style with my imagery.

I spoke to the printer today, before everything I had the idea that I wanted to create five books, each 22 pages long, black case bound, foil lettering on the front bottom right hand corner. The printer was pretty simple and said it’s 20p a sheet printed, but I would have to change companies to get my book bound. So I phone the company they advised me on and I talked through all the different options I could take, worked out pretty much the same as what I originally wanted. Although he did say it would work out better if instead of five 22 page books, maybe I could have just one book with all the stories combined, helping the longevity of the book and the binding. I tried combining all the layouts and the stories; it worked well as, giving me more choice with separation documents and more texture. This unlike before where I had to worry about the cost and couldn’t change one style without changing the style for all 5 books etc.