Our Complex Text project was, as we were told on Tuesday, "impossible" and a highly unlikely scenario. Thankfully, we didn't know better and poured ourselves into balancing our nine annotated manuscripts while retaining the readability of each. As the brief explains, we were "to examine different systems of cueing notes, explore variant typographic treatment for all parts of the text, experiment with the placement of notes on a page, to balance typeface, typesize, and spacing in a cohesive whole, and develop a critical eye for micro-typography"
The task pertains to Readers’ Classics, a new (fictional) series of annotated classics:
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Shakespeare, Henry V
Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
La Fontaine, Fables (in verse translation)
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
The Gospel According to Matthew
Henry James, Washington Square
Rilke, Selected Poems (parallel German and English text)
Laozi, Daodejing (parallel Chinese and English text)
After spending considerable time loitering around bookstores with my rulers and camera phone looking at how Penguin, Oneworld, and Oxford have handled the same titles I noted that heavily annotated editions were often presented as resources. However, even as resources they adhered to classic, often nostalgic graphic themes. I decided to focus on the classics as material that is studies and chose to focus on students as the target market. The supplementary information provided in each of the text files was substantial enough to consider this series as a “go-to” reference and ideally would be thoroughly used. A softcover will ensure that the books are easily carried around, lent out, dog tagged, and marked-up in the margins.
I took design cues from instruction manuals and eventually travel books, the smartest of which are Phaidon's Wallpaper* City Guide collection. Using simple typography and strong colours this series establishes itself as one worth collecting. A more neutral approach to tone also gives the publisher ample room to add titles in the future. Working with typefaces such as Univers, Trade Gothic, Gotham, and Helvetica instantly set the series as strong and modern. Each of these designs have large families making them robust enough to handle a wide variety of titling and reference needs. Texture on the page would be created with changes in weight and size as well as colour.
I decided early that the unifying factors (the design elements used consistently in each book) would be stronger than the variations. I chose to keep the house style rigid because the texts themselves are so varied in structure and style. Each differs enough that each can hold their own next to another and introducing interpretive (typographic) elements I did not think would be necessary or efficient. While I structured my page according to Tschichold’s classic proportions, my type systems stayed minimal and clean. Body text and all additional body residing inside the main text block would be consistently set in a serif (Adobe Garamond Pro). All references, explanatory notes, and titles would be set in the sans (Univers). Combinations of these two styles would be seen only on a table of contents page.
The grid and layout was determined according to ninths. Each major starting point in text either starts at the top of a page or along the vertical guide established by the diagonals in Tschichold’s proportions. If a beginning does not appear to begin on the guide, it hinges on it. All in-text annotations, most obviously seen in Matthew and Henry V, are arranged horizontally also along the guides provided by the proportions above. This includes the title pages (full and half), and table of contents pages. License was given to circumstances involving poetics, which by nature ask for flexibility. In order to keep lines together there are cases where text will run the entire length of a column.
Currently, it's far from sexy. What I have here is structured framework which could stand to have some personality. The perspective gained with critique and some distance makes me eager to refine text settings, navigational tools and typographic details. The annotation text is simply too small and held hostage by the multiples I established in my baseline. An initial colour scheme will guide how each book is differentiated. Cover stock will be an uncoated, unbleached stock with solid colour titling. Illustrative components will be considered. Still LOTS to do!
