Dissertation Editorial

I put my dissertation editorial together over the last couple weeks.

Here are some samples of the outcomes:

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I wanted the editorial to look as much like an old mass market paperback as possible so I made it the same format. This was originally at 4×7 inches but I found this format hard to design for; It was too small for multiple columns. I opted for the next novel size up, at 5.5×7.5 inches; still pretty small and still a MMP size. The square block on the front is an encoding of the entire dissertation. This is a reference to the work I created as my dissertation artefact and encoded the entire novel in binary on the cover. Inside, I originally wanted to try making the entire thing in spot colour. I had started with making it in red, black and white, with full colour images but I found some problems with that : for one, the images seemed all very incongruous with each other, and for another I feel like a lot of my editorial tends to default to red white and black. I wanted to make something that was different. I went in planning on making it in spot cyan but ended up choosing red for some in- chapter titles. The one exception to the cyan images were my artefacts themselves which I put in full colour, as it felt best to represent them properly, especially seen as they all play with CMYK colour channels as part of how they work.

I put the images in cyan with a colour half tone effect for a couple reasons: for one, it unites the entire editorial a bit better, as I discussed. Another was to account for the DPI differences between the images; my strategy was to place the images raw as jpgs onto the pages until I was happy. I would then turn the Jpgs into psds, resize them to be exactly the correct size at 300dpi and throw the half tone onto it to account for any loss of quality and set it monotone there.

I am sorting out getting it printed perfect bounded as the above mock up shows. I was originally going to go for thin uncoated pages like you’d find in a old paperback, unfortunately, seen as the book itself is about 60 pages long, this made for about 2mm of spine! So Ive oped for slightly thicker paper, still uncoated to retain the texture of a paperback, with a 5mm spine instead. this is still slightly thinner than I would have liked but it’s an improvement. I will be ordering the cover slightly thicker with silk coating, again in order to emulate a paperback.

FMP – Printing & Exhibition

Since finalising my 9 A3 posters and 3 A5 editorial booklets I had to consuder how it would look in the final show and how I would get it printed.

For paper, I knew the project was all about colour so I needed something that showed it off best. So uncoated was out of the question. I ended up choosing silk over gloss because its less reflective and therefore would glare a lot less.

For the editorials I had the same paper, aside from opting for 170gm rather than 300 to allow for the booklet to be opened easily. I went for staple saddle stitching. This was my space proposal:

I figured I coudl get away with some verticality in my presentation seen as the visual information on the posters are simple enough.

I managed to get it up! It looked like this:

Done!!!

Finalising the FMP

Finalised my editorial, having it now come in at 36 pages. This includes two spreads about the himba tribe:

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I also included a spread about Pingelap:

I also reintroduced some areas of white and calm, for example int eh following pages:

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I have also decided that Im going to print three versions of this editorial, and have made alternate versions where all images and colours have been edited to represent deuteranopia and tritanopia. I added a page to explain what these phrases mean to link it more strongly to the posters again and supply some more answers.

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I realise this breaks some of the pages that use colour as indicative of differences, for example this tritan version of the different colour blindnesses:

I think I had to chose between making these consistently the same throughout the document and not colour managing them in the same way, or having them like this. I decided on the latter. I figured the posters on the wall explain the difference adequately enough as is. The objective of the re- coloured booklets is to show off the difference in perception. I think it’s interesting to see how people with colourblindness see other versions of colourblindness too. It would have been more confusing to have random pages exempt from the colour management. Consistency is key.

FMP Poster Updates

My posters went through a few new versions over this week. I wanted to tie them back to the new editorial which has turned into the main part of my project. I needed to marry them back up; Bring over the visual language of the dots, or something else from the editorials. my first try at this looked like so:

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I wasnt happy with how these looked. I dont think they have unity with the editorial yet, and I thnk they don’t look as aesthetically pleasing as the previous versions. I realised that I needed to make them black as much as anything. I also needed to make the dots a lot bigger so they didnt completely lose their colour scaled down.

I ended up landing on these:

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I brought back the ishimara imagery that I utilised in the book for a couple diagrams and changed them to all depict scenes in mainly the colour they are referencing. I’ve also cut it down to just Red, Green, and Blue, thinking in terms of what I want to show in my exhibition space. RGB are the natural colours to choose as they are the three kinds of colour receptive cones we have in our eyes. I dropped the visual links to Pantone; I think the aesthetic of the entire project has evolved on its own beyond that. These posters are stronger for having dropped it.

FMP Editorial Development

Sent off a rough version of my editorial to tutors for a review over easter. It looked like this:

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I had tried to give it structure by lacing the entire thing with the Guy Deutscher interview whilst maintaining a lot of differences in the design otherwise. I wasn’t happy with the martian colours spread very much, and wanted a better way to lay that page out, that connected more with the title and contents. I was also thinking about how it was starting to look very different to my original posters.

My feedback was as follows:

Hi Billy
I think it has a good consistency in terms of editorial rigour but I would suggest that there needs to be more light and shade in terms of pace. It is full on, all of the time and working would the pace would help with this. I also feel that it is a little light in terms of content. This is such a broad and theoretically rich subject matter and I feel that creating a booklet as opposed to a more detailed publication or digital footprint, could reiterate the importance of this. 
I especially like “The Explanatory Gap” spread and feel that you could use this illustrative approach through more.

So: I will be generating more content based on my research (and theres plenty more content to put in! I may cover the Hima Tribe and how they see colour, and pingelap, an island of people who are all colourblind.

I am gonna try and rearrange some pages to have some white on the page also, with oases of more standard black type on white paper areas to brign some contrast and pacing to the editorial.

Editorial Design

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been writing and designing content for my editorial.

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I’ve realised its taken on a style of its own, and I will probably want to revisit the posters to adjust them to fit.

I have had an idea: I could make seperate editorials based on the same colour differences as the posters using hte same filters. or I could possibly include elements that match to colourblind people on the page as such:

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Will investigate this.

Easter FMP Work

Had my end of term presentation on my FMP last week. I brought my posters as they were in the previous blog and some examples of an editorial piece:

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The editorial will take readers through the same journey I went on learning about colour, and help explain the posters.

When I mentioned I designed my posters to invoke Pantone colours, I was encouraged to strengthen this. So, I redesigned the posters to more closely resemble Pantone swatches; I tried to find a font match for the Pantone brand itself, and went for Acumin pro. I adjusted the layout to have a square block of colour at the top, to have a colour name in bold and in all-caps as well as a subtitle in a lighter weight. This would normally be the pantone number itself but I swapped that out for the colour blindness type. I figured the words themselves are strange enough that it doesn’t entirely remove the intrigue by being obvious straight away. I was also advised to cut the colour meanings text; these are obvious with the presentation of the colour anyway. My audience is other designers in this case and the Pantone brand is a visual language understood well by designers. 

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Finalising the FMP

I designed posters to illustrate colours as a deuteranope would see them. I did this by getting accurate CMYK codes for each colour, and then putting that colour through the Sim Daltonism filter to give me something that looks the same to me, but is in fact very different. I realised that without context this wouldn’t mean very much so I opted to create food based patterns for each colour. My reasoning for this was that when I showed people things filtered to match deuteranopia, I’d tend to see bigger reaction when people saw food; it would often look gross. So, I designed patterns for each to invoke food that would match the colour. I also collected semiotic inferences for each of the colours to have at the bottom. I wanted these posters to be strange and confusing at first, and combined with a piece of editorial, communicate the message that colour isn’t as simple as it seems.I decided I would increase the scope of these posters to also include versions with tritanopia, blue/yellow colour blindness, as well. Further than this, I added ‘correct’ versions of each poster, so I had a triptych of each colour. It was these I brought to a tutorial. 

Afterlife: Storm & Shelter

Enjoyed an entertaining talk from Storm & Shelter, a video production company from the South of Wales

Some advice:

What you need to be thinking about

• What kind of stuff do I want to be doing?
• What sort of work “makes my downstairs bits tingle?”
• Where do I see myself a year from now?
• Am I setting myself up to kick serious ass?
• What can I make now that will make others think “oh shit”?

What you need to do

• CREATE. Make as much as you can even if its bad
• Push yourself to develop your skills.
• Step out of your comfort zone.
• Go read “How to win friends and influence people” by Dale Carnegie
• Network! Get to know people.
• Not “sit on your arse” and expect you’ll get a job
• “Organisations will hire for culture first and train for skill”.

Alex: The things I wish someone had told me

• Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
• Work is important, but not worth killing yourself over.  Gotta put the graft in but your health comes first
• Theres no right or wrong way of doing it
• But no ones gonna do it for you
• Ask yourself what success looks like to you
• Be the change you want to see in the world.
• Stop comparing yourself.
• Stop worrying.

My take away from the storm and shelter presentation was that there can be a huge difference between the company cultures of different agencies. I think when I visit for interviews or inspect websites of possible jobs, Im going to be more cognisant of this. The company culture of Storm and Shelter was really fun; I’d enjoy working there.

FMP: Radiolab on Colour

Listened to this Radiolab podcast about colour. And it’s got me thinking that maybe theres a lot more to colour perception than we know. In the podcast, the presenters interview linguist Guy Deutscher. Deutcher talks about William Gladstone’s research into The Iliad by Homer, and how lots of colours are described unusually; honey is described as green, the sea is described as wine red, and the sky is often referred to as bronze. So was Homer colourblind? It turns out not, and his psychedelic palette was common in ancient greek writing. One thing that sticks out is the absolute absence of blue. As it turns out, the Ancient Greeks hadn’t invented the concept of blue yet. This is quite complicated to explain, but it sounds like, seen as blue is quite an uncommon colour outside of the manufactured world, the ancient greeks didn’t ever really need a word to talk about it. So what about the sky? Deutscher makes reference to a slightly anecdotal experiment he performed on his own daughter: He brought her up teaching her all the colours, blue included, but never mentioned that the sky itself was blue. Eventually, he put the question to her: what colour is the sky? And his daughter didn’t understand the question, and couldn’t answer. Eventually, after a couple months, she came to a conclusion; the sky is white.

Supposedly, most older civilisations didn’t have a word for blue either, for similar reasons. In fact, colours tend to be “discovered” in the same order in most cultures. The pattern of these colours’ discovery follows another pattern: the invention of new dyes. Blue dye is hard to make naturally so it comes a lot later. The podcast also interviews Jules Davidoff, professor of neuropsychology at London University. Davidoff worked with members of the Himba tribe, in Nambia. The Himba are similar to the Ancient Greeks in that they also don’t have a word for blue. Davidoff showed preformed a test; he presented members of the Himba tribe with a selection of squares on a laptop. All except one of the squares was green. the final square was blue. A simple question was posed: which square is different? To the Himba participants, there was no difference. Perhaps then, we only learn colours as labels for certain wavelengths of light, and train our brains to interpret them as so; that colour doesn’t intrinsically look like anything at all. This lends credence to the idea of colour being qualia: There really must be no standard for what blue is, or what red is, outside of vague ranges of wavelengths of light. One persons blue really could look nothing like someone else’s, and there would be no way to know one way or another.

What does this mean for colourblindness, then? I supposedly am biologically incapable of seeing green. This helps me understand how I, personally, have an idea of green in my own perception. Grass, for instance, looks “green” to me, and I think of things that look like grass as being green. I know things famous for being green are green. I used to think blonde people had green hair when I was little. But as I’ve grown up I no longer percieve lighter haired people as having green hair. There evidently is so much more going on with colour perception than cones in the eye. Wow.