MA Project: Type and page. 

I am studying a masters degree in graphic design at the University of Falmouth, which I study part time around my full time job. We get given weekly briefs with 1 week to complete the lectures, research and the brief. This weeks brief: 

Take an excerpt from a national poet or writer and transform the text into a single typographic composition;

•Redesign the first line of text in a style that’s appropriate to the subject - draw it, render it, build it;

•Then take the body of the text and typeset it.

•Be experimental. How does leading, positioning, stresses on particular words and detailing affect the power of the piece?

•How is meaning affected by interpretation in a tangible way?

•What is the relationship of the page?

For this task, I have chosen a poem written by Tolkien in the Lord of the rings books. The poem:

"All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost"

I started by picking some twigs and leaves from the tree in my garden and used some ink to create some mark-making around the word 'deep roots'. I rubbed some leaves and mud into the paper to create some stains and textures as well.

I then played with more clippings masks using the marks made from the twigs which I thought looks pretty interesting and I quite like the inverted versions though as an interesting background.

I thought that this typeface looked the most root like so I scanned this version and used the trace tool in illustrator to create a vector of the shapes.

Inspired by David Carsons Ray Gun Magazine, I started to typeset the rest of the poem around this typeface and played with the spacing and layout looking at the words. The first line was quite tricky, I didn't want to use colour so I just thought spacing it out would add some emphasis. The second line, I tried to create the word 'wander' to look like it's wandering, and then I wanted the 'are lost' to be on its own. Then obviously 'strong' is in a bolder font, and the word 'wither' it supposed to look like its withering. 'Are not reached' was supposed to be furthest away from the 'deep roots' showing that it doesn't reach it, and then I played quite a bit with the last line 'by the frost' but I thought it looked better just simple. I then added the textures I created with the twigs, ink and mud from the garden.