Wk #2 DYNAMICS OF DESIGN
For this week’s exercise I have chosen the movie Pride & Prejudice with Kiera Knightley. There’s no telling how many times I watched the movie and enjoyed it so much that I later read the book. As much as I love the story and the book, it’s important to note that I don’t like any other movie version – just this one. My strong attraction is the time period, coupled with fantastic dialogue and the story creates a great tension between two foolish characters that come together in the end. The title exactly conveys what this story is about- pride and prejudice, something we can all relate to.
For this exercise I drew inspiration from Kidd’s section on color theory. I don’t think the original cover needed fixing, I love it as is as it has great type, colors and photos, both in focus and out of focus. The serif type shows the words “pride “and “prejudice” the same size and color, perhaps conveying they’re the same with a larger ampersand in a romantic rose hue in the middle touching both words to make a connection. The photo has Lizzie looking back at Mr. Darcy ready to break out in smile and blurred Mr. Darcy is shown waiting to learn Lizzie’s reaction. The colors are soft, natural warm and have a historic feel. So I didn’t think I could do anything to improve the image and instead tried a variation to undo the whole feel to show how important all the elements used were.
I took the photos from the internet and used the website Pixlr to make the photos black and white and then to recolor the lips red. Kidd in his book took an image and made it black and white and then used color in the letters of the type to make the composition work. I choose not to recreate that, but instead to use dramatic colors like found in my Slack post with The Godfather book cover. I chose two photos that didn’t necessarily convey a story. They’re both the same size, focus, looking the same way and their emotions are not clear. Using Word I assembled the images with the text, choosing a bland sans serif type all the same size and making it black and the ampersand red to stand out. The red ampersand was in line with the red lips, which I did like. The choice to make the lips red was to evoke the notion that this could be a story about love or dialogue. Omitted in my version is the bottom photo, I think it was in the original mainly to balance the design and enhance the colors used.
I think using color in a different way is a good effect and would work for other genres of stories (like horror) but is not a good element for this story.