My competition Brief for this year is within ISTD, I decided to choose an ISTD/Typography brief as I think that is the area of graphic design that I need to work on strengthening most, this alongside it’s constant presence within Graphic Design meaning it is not something that I can escape developing, given my noticed weakness within typographic works in my previous projects this will be a tough brief to fulfil, hopefully pushing me far out of my comfort zone and allowing me to focus purely on typography for a number of weeks will then arm me with a large plethora of specialist techniques for using typography in the future as well as a better general understanding of typography/editorial design overall.
I hope to achieve this by conducting large amounts of experimentation, this is the reason for my specific brief selection within ISTD, I feel of the selection this was the most experimental as I have the opportunity to not only create title pages and covers for the book above, I also have the opportunity to express at least four tales within the book, expressed solely with typography. This part of the brief attracted me especially, the complete focus on typography will mean that I cannot rely on my image creation skills that I find more refined to cover up any mistakes and missing parts I have within my typography skills. There will be no easy way out and I will have to dig right into typographical and printing techniques in order to express the complex novel that I have tasked myself with.
Best Practice Research
https://www.behance.net/collection/180422347/ISTD
Through analysis of many previous award winning entries of ISTD briefs I am noticing a number of consistent trends within those that achieve merits or higher; The variance of printing techniques in order to achieve varying degrees of finishes are notices, not sticking to a standard ink print may be needed. Most noticed is the use of digital stitch in a commendation awarded piece used to reflect the texture of a tennis court and the grass that would be put there, I think this contributed to the commendation award as it clearly displayed not only an acute understanding of the brief that was issued, but also a showcase of the designers broad skill range and professional quality finish. This will need to be considered within my work, due to the fact my brief is centred around a book, it would be easy to fall into the trap of illustrating my concepts as they would be presented within any other book, not having my work stand out among the pile would not ensure that I achieve an ISTD.
Supporting this point is the fact that the brief mentions that Invisible Cities, “Despite being called a novel, is not truly a novel at all”. This clearly unorthodox approach to writing must be reflected in my response to the brief, this will be explored further when I follow up by picking apart the brief further and begin considering initial concepts in response.
A trap I normally fall into when creating editorial/heavily typographical pieces of work is that I often do not give enough space to different elements of the type, if something needs an entire page to sit on, on its own to have its maximum effect, I should consider doing that regardless of if the rest of the page is not containing information and it inevitably extends the overall page length of my publication/editorial. This technique is seen throughout the examples of best practice, and even seen within some of the ISTD covers, just having a simple heading on a plain background is enough if it can be supported by sufficient reason and research into why that particular work is no nonsense and needs to be simplistic.
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