This semester’s final podcast was an episode of Design Matters featuring Tina Roth Eisenburg. Eisenburg is a Swiss designer living in Brooklyn who has done work for the Museum of Modern Art, is the mind behind the CreativeMornings lecture series, and is the proprietor of her website/identity, Swiss Miss.
Swiss Miss is itself a very interesting site. What started out as a visual inventory became a popular site providing a daily stream of noteworthy, inspirational, and often very dissonant content. Just on the most recent page, entries range from tshrits with tiny chalkboards on them to “soothing spaceship sounds” to an animated reminder to keep breathing after Tuesday.
So how does she do it? How does Eisenburg take topics and images and videos that all vary so greatly both in visuals and in content and make them all look like they belong in the same publication visually?
That’s essentially what we have to figure out for our Bookforms final project. The AYG system and my rENs folio don’t even look like distant cousins to each other, so at least in my own case, I’m left with two extremely different works in terms of color, content and tone to figure out how to balance and represent appropriately. On top of that, throw in four months of my own blog ramblings and silly pictures to organize and present alongside my work and I begin to face a bit of a challenge.
This week’s reading in Layout Essentials focused on breaking out of the grid structure, and then rethinking the way we use grids to achieve unique and unconventional results. I’ve never been great at using a traditional grid and sticking to it throughout a piece. I’m a big fan of reserved and clean design when other people do it, I just have a lot of trouble doing it decently myself. These chapters certainly appeal to me and I would love to experiment with the Bookform more through this project, but I also feel as though a more understated layout is called for to let my work do the talking. I think I’m going to go through the book again to perhaps get some ideas for the kind of style I want for my piece, and I can definitely see this book being a great reference tool for projects down the line.