#heroresearch

[calumdixon]

Heroes & Villains - 1890 Newspaper Advertisements 

To help me build a believable world around the story I created for my newspaper, I’m going to use advertisements and other stories to make it feel like the world is moving around the story as if the death of sherlock is just one event in a much bigger narrative. With the events being set in 1890 I wanted to look for newspaper advertisements from around this period, to get a feel for how they looked and what they showed. What I found was that in most cases they didn’t include imagery, which would make sense as printing an image was significantly more expensive than type and an ad with an image needed more page space which made it even more expensive.

Another thing that I noticed was that they adverts had very odd typography, the type would often vary in size, style or even in font family. There could be plenty of reasons for this such as trying to catch they eye of the reader without using an image to save on costs. The ads for this reason were also much more type heavy. Some of the adverts would even go into small paragraphs explaining their products rather than just presenting a brief introduction.

[calumdixon]

Heroes & Villians - Secret Messages/Cipher Messages

While brainstorming ideas for creating a unique narrative I thought of the idea of using Cipher messages to encode secret codes into the site. These would be great for including small easter eggs that reward the reader for their effort. They could also be effective at furthering the existing narrative as it wouldn’t be a stretch on the imagination to believe that genius detective such as Sherlock Holmes would be familiar with and use encrypted messages.

One of the ciphers that interested me the most was the Caesar Cipher because the details for the cipher key could easily be hidden within the site. The Caesar cipher shifts the letters of a sentence by a chosen number of spaces, if for example my key is 2 spaces, then A would become C.

[calumdixon]

Heroes & Villains - British Newspapers 

While looking back on my research I noticed that most of the newspapers I had looked at came from America, So I went back and looked at some British Newspapers. For the most part the styles are the same, although I did notice that British newspapers didn’t chose to indent each new line on headings, instead they would chose to center align the content. Although there were exceptions such as the Daily Express who would use the American style in some situations while in others using the British Approach. Other than that the newspapers of Britain and America are quite similar, you’ll notice small differences here and there but it these aren’t consistent enough across all the papers in the nation to confidently say that these are due to where the paper is being published instead of a design choice that is specific to that newspaper publisher. 

[calumdixon]

Heroes & Villains - Annie Atkins | The Secret World of Graphic Design for Filmmaking 

Following up from the 99% invisible podcast, I also took a look at the AIGA design talk that Annie Atkins did, in this she mentions a lot of the same things as before but there was one thing that struck a chord with me that was never mentioned in the podcast, which was how the inclusion of poor design decisions can be a useful tool for narrative story telling. During the talk the example given was the poor kerning on the sign of the Grand Budapest Hotel, the original sign likely would never have looked liked that so its not a stretch to imagine that the letters fell off and had been placed back again but poorly. The same applies to the newspaper project I am working on, looking back on the old newspapers I put in my blog you can see lots of design decisions which we would never use today such as center aligned type in content other than a headline. In the past we didn’t fully understand how to optimize text for legibility, so we often made choices that affected it poorly, incorporating these concepts would help build a most realistic and believable recreation of a old newspapers.

[calumdixon]

Hero Props: Graphic Design in Film & Television - 99% Invisible

When a new movie comes out most of the plaudits go to the director, the producer and the lead actors, but there are so many other people involved in a film, and a lot of them are designers. There are costume designers and set designers, but also graphic designers working behind the screens on all

Heroes & Villains - 99% invisible’s Interview with Annie Atkins

In yesterday’s lecture Chris talked to us about the prop designer Annie Atkins who has worked on amazing movies such as The Grand Budapest Hotel. He also mentioned an interview she did with Roman Mars the creator of one of my favorite podcasts called 99% invisible. In the interview they talk about some of Annie’s past work and as well as some of the challenges faced when making props such as the why the internet can be an unreliable source for making props because content is often mislabeled as something it isn’t, a common example would be assigning a wrong time period. Luckily for the case of my newspapers I don’t need to worry about these issues as they have the date they were published printed on them. I think the talk gave me a pretty fresh outlook on the project on things to consider when it comes making the content for my site. I should definitely try to look for the small design details that make the original designs identifiable with their time, for example making sure only to use typefaces that were available during the time period.

[calumdixon]

Heroes & Villains - Big Apple Hot Dogs

Chris was showing off the website for Big Apple Hot Dogs earlier in today’s lecture and I noticed a small detail that I really liked for my typography. The dividers that the site used included a tiny sausage icon to go with the theme of the website. I think including something similar to this would be a great idea as q quick way of identifying Sherlock related materials among the other unrelated articles.

[calumdixon]

Heroes & Villains More old newspapers

I thought it would be a good idea to look at some more old newspapers, so that I could continue to get a better feel for the different techniques used. Each newspaper seemed to approach certain problems slightly differently. For example some of the newspapers would highlight the main headline in a huge type title at the top of the newspaper while others would decide not to. Another example would be that some of the newspapers decide to indent each new line on titles. While talking with Chris we discussed the idea of creating a newspaper like this which sherlock related articles mixed in surrounded by the other non sherlock related articles and adverts

[calumdixon]

Heroes & Villains - Newspaper Design For the Times

The last book I took out of the library for some research was book that discussed the design of the various different American Newspapers. The designs discussed were all relatively recent with the earliest examples being found from the 1970′s, So it should be really helpful if I decent to take a more present day approach to the newspaper concept.

I hadn’t actually noticed until now how different each newspaper layout is, some layouts opt for a huge number of columns while others stay relatively low,lots of different typography techniques are being put in action like the heavy use of drop caps seen in one of the examples. One of the things that I hadn’t really thought about until now was just how important the use of visual dividers are to newspapers, they are really easy to overlook but if you even picture one of the above layouts without them they would become so much more confusing to read. Their use nearly breaks up different stories in way that makes what would otherwise be an extremely confusing layout and turns it into something workable.