On Monday, our group assembled with our tentative layouts to talk to Richard about actualizing our publication. As we predicted, we all showed up with vastly different layouts and spreads and fonts, but with works in front of us, the decisions we needed to make to unify the style seemed much more clear.
Fonts – In our individual layouts, we all used different fonts. The consensus was that for captions and headers we would use a sans serif font and for larger body text, we would use a serif font. We decided on 10 pt for body text and 8 pt for captions, all left aligned. Teresa had used baskerville as her body font in her original layout spreads, and we as group thought that it looked quite nice. To do captions, she chose a font that paired well. Ricahrd suggested to us a pair of slightly more modern fonts that compared to baskerville.
Headers – We decided that we did not want to have headers/footers reiterating the artist name, as in our text, the name of the artist would be used because our text would be from the first person.
Grids – Richard pointed out that a unifying factor for a publication is a grid, and the more complex the grid, the more flexible it is. Considering that we were using a square a 12 x 12 grid seemed like a reasonable option.
Footers – we were debating between having page numbers or purposely allowing the reader to become disorientated by not knowing when to start. However, with the fact of the matter that we had to indicate a sort of beginning with the placement of our group manifesto and a sort of table of contents. (However, we were considering displaying contents not with page numbers but with corresponding colors for cover pages that would act as dividers between artists.)
Paper – Ideally, what we would have would be a series of cover pages in a slightly thicker stock than the content pages to indicate a demarcation between artists/alternative covers in different colors. For now, we will just digitally indicate these cover pages with colored pages, but we will plan to find a printer to see what is possible for the actual launch.
The biggest conclusion that we had after the tutorial was that we needed to make a blank prototype to understand the confines of our layout. And when we made one, we figured out that we would actually be able to shift in a full circle using 90 degree turns between each artist. We could, physically, but it mean that for at least two of us, the pages would have to be read in a slightly counter-intuitive manner–one would have to be read from right to left and another would have to be read from down to up. We were okay with the idea of shifting orientations in that some people would have vertical spreads and some would have horizontal spreads. However, presenting all four orientations created a larger cost in readibility than for aesthetic game.
From this prototype, we were able to extract a general master page layout. We concluded that the publication would only shift 90 degrees to right and 90 degrees to the left so that the reader would be switching between horizontal and vertical spreads. However, they would never have to encounter something that would make you read pages from right to left or down to up. We determined whose work was better suited to a horizontal spread, and made a plan to meet the next day at 11 am in order to further discuss a master-grid, transition pages, and fonts.
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