Brief 2 - Design Principles - What is a Book? : Designing a Double Page (Massimo Vignelli)

After I had shortened down the interview with Massimo Vignelli I played around with the composition of the type and quite liked the idea of having it stepping up. 

I decided to move his name so that it became a block. This left the blue strip down the side free and also kept the text neat and precise. 

A simple line underneath the title really separates it off from the body copy.

One idea I began to play around with was having the 6 type faces he argues for down the side. This added another element to the page but didn't over complicate it or distract from the main text.

I also experimented with having it going upwards instead of down but I found that this was quite hard to look at as it disrupted the natural line of your eye.

I played around with the leading to see if I could use a bigger point size but keep it in the space. However I found that at this size the fonts looked odd so close together without enough space to stand alone. They loose their unique qualities and all blend together.

I played around with the fonts across the right at the top however it would mean loosing the stepped paragraphs and it would make the right page very crowded compared to if it was in the blue box.

One thing I played with was having the fonts in a black box. Previous pages have had subheadings in this style so I felt like it may work in this instance. However it didn't. It really attracted your attention and the rest of the page became lost, it was also hard to get an equal gap between the boxes.

I felt like the page needed a summing up paragraph at the beginning to explain what the article is about. Since Vignelli is famous for a love for Helvetica I decided to write it in this font. I actually really liked how it looked (above) so I decided to try the whole page in it. However I found this didn't work as well as Baskerville.

This was the finished page. I used lines either side of the introductiory paragraph to seperate it, I also used a san serif (Helvetica) to make it clear and upped the point size by one. I went through and removed all the orphans however there are still aspects that need editing such as some of the spacing and lining up.