Designing the spot varnish bits

I had to move quickly with this also to meet the deadlines I'd set myself in latest action plan (see project management file), The key to the success of the spot varnish elements is really about making sure the typographical elements say a message uniquely and clearly, that the symbol choices are appropriate to what the rest of the message is about and that elements of it are clever, echoing themes from within the regular content of the book.

I started with the spread about 'Secret Societies and The Lizard Men' because I had a really strong idea of what I wanted to do with it. I wanted to put lizard eyes of Barack Obama's eyes in spot varnish and then put an Illuminati symbol on his forehead, I thought that this would be quite a nice way to tie the content of the book and the spot varnish elements together on this page:


I thought that this worked OK, but its a very similar concept to the cover and I don't want te book to feel like it's playing the same symbols over and over again.


Despite this I tried puttingin a circle shape to mimic an iris to see how it would look, It looks eve worse, I think the heaviness of the filled in circles overpowers the linework of the rest of the symbol.


I then decided to look at an upside down pentagram. The theories about the secret societies are often doomsday theories from extreme christian thinking, so the idea that Obama might be the Antichrist seems appropriate. I also quite like the shock factor of sticking a pentagram on Obama who is quite a popular political figure over here.

I started working with some type, using Dave's 'extralight' version of his theory typeface. I started writing text that had enough words to mimic the way the type is laid out in the normal content, with the same line spacing and point size also. I started with the phrase 'THEY rule the world' but I wanted to highlight the most absurd of the theories as the truth so I changed it to 'REPTILES rule the worlds.' Then I put it into the document just to check everything lined up properly and also to simulate how it might lok as a spot varnsih byt reducing the opacity of the overlays to around 20%. At this point with all of them it allowed me to assess whether this idea was gong to work or not, thankfully, I feel that on this layout I'd come up with something really strong quite early. I could move on and work quickly.





The next layout I decided to work on was the 'Little Green Men' spread about aliens. It was another one that I had a strong idea about. I was inspired by this image:

It was supposedly given to renound crackpot/UFOlogist George Adamski by an alien in 1952, and he superimposed it onto his own photograph of a UFO. I figured that this image would be a nice collection of appropriate an odd symbols that would look quite effective, so I decided to recreate this ready to stick on the UFO picture I'd gotten from Jonny's books.
I simply drew the symbols out and scanned them in, ready to go. I turned them into illustrator files so I could increase the size if needs be and I started reconstructing the image in Indesign:


I started with the symbols I'd scanned and then used the normal layout as a guide to start bulding the symbols up around it. I put in the unusual swastika style shape central to the UFO craft in the Adamski image, but it looked a bit out on it's own.


I added some symbols around the swastika using unusual Sanskrit and symbol type families. This seemed to narrow the gap between styles of the symbols and the swastika thing. I also added some more symbols by copying th eorginals, flipping them upside down and delting half of them to fill out the page a little better.


I tried putting an oval round the UFO to mimic the Adamski image but it looked to smooth and didn't really suit the chaotic appearance of the symbols at all to well, so I decided to remove that.


I then added some circles to create a little bit of symmetry and also mimic an alternate version of adamski's drawing (not shown) where the symbols outside of the craft have become circular blotches. I felt that this worked because it balanced the darkness of the handles on the swastika type symbol.

I then quickly did the type, ensuring that it was the same point size and line spacing as the title on the page in the printed document so there would be a symmetry between the two. I chose the phrase 'Aliens walk among us' because it's one phrase that seems to permeate the culture revolving around this kind of conspiracy thinking. It's also a nice bold statement that works well with the concept of the spot varnish elements revealing the truth secretly, whilst the balanced view of the regular print is in fact false.



Here it is against




I followed this up with responding to the moon landing hoax page in a similarly quick fashion. Looking at the ciruclar image of the moon, I knew I had to do something that responded to that shape. I tried to lay out text that would lie within it, and again I went for a bold statement that kind of flies in the face of what we understand as established fact. This was in order to keep with the concept of the spot varnish telling truth, whilst the body copy of the booklet would give a balanced view that is actually lies.




I changed 'we' to man because 'we' makes the book or the author feel part of humanity, where as I'd rather it be completely detached. The statement feels more truthful if it is presented as unbiased fact, the 'we' makes it feel a little too personal for this.


Here is the text in context, I made it orange for the purposes of showing where it sits, and then I put it into 20% opacity to preview the spot varnish, but it's very difficult to view the black on dark blue anyway, so it might be difficult to see on the image.


I didn't do too much more with this, it isn't relay as based in symbology as the other conspiracies, they're about arms races and the government rather than aliens or secret societies. I thought I'd let the strength of those words speak for themselves.

For the Assassination and death section, I started with the phrase 'they are after you', I wanted to play on the paranoia that a lot of conspiracy theorists feel. I worked with this in a similar way as to before, making sure the type lined up with the type on the regularly printed page. I put in a symbol for a target, because I thought that this summised the themes of the spread very well. I also then decided to change the phrase to 'they knew too much' making a bold statement but less aggressive and directed at the reader.






Final overlayed on the document, 8% opacity, mimicking it's appearance as a spot varnish.


It's in the water:
I had the deadline dramatically encroaching at this point so I blitzed this last one out, trying to make sure I could have these done in time for deadline. I'm ashamed to say I used a phrase that came to my head quite quickly a long with a recogniseable symbol for water. I made sure that these were contained within the frame of the image on the main document, and that was it. This is not best practice and I'm realising now that I haven't been using my time efficiently if it's coming to a rough job at the end. I wanted these sport varnish elements to be well considered, and with some of them, they are quite well considered, but I feel like there's an inconsistency there, thankfully because it's a unique finish, the strength of the overall concept is probably enough to hide these.






Ultimately the issue here again is that I've gone on making decisions without recording them thoroughly and now the record is fragmented and not an accurate representation of what I tired and how many different ways I approached this book. I also did this over reading week on my own with an infant. I didn't really have many people's opinions to ask, so I feel like this half of the project has become quite insular. There's not much I can do about this with the deadline for getting this printed in time for the book fair looming.

Proactive things to do about above problem:
-I need to begin thoroughly planning my time,my work for this project has begun to suffer because I'm not planning out what I need to do and giving myself appropriate timescales.
-After this project is put to bed, I need to ensure that the rest of the projects in this module are more thoroughly documented, I'm going to lose marks on this brief because of it and I need to ensure that the rest of my briefs are better documented in order to limit the damage.

Cover designs

OK, so I've had a few ideas about what I want to do for the cover, inspired by the direction the content is going anyway, so I wanted to get this done quickly so I could focus on design production early next week.
I wanted to work with either an eye, acting as a symbol for observing, truthfinding etc. or a hand with the illuminati/magic eye in it, which is an african symbol to repel demons and black magic (http://www.answers.com/topic/black-magic -last paragraph) Both have appropriate meanings to the content, and can be made visually appropriate to the book through photography turned into duotone images similar to those inside the book. I took a photo of my eye and my hand using an art filter on my camera called pinhole, which simulates a pinhole camera, where there's a circular rim round the image of increasing shadow, this created a grungy and old feel to the photographs which felt appropriate to the way the images feel inside the book. Here is documentation of me trying to get my eye to the colour I wanted using the monotone tool:





I tried to get to a point where there was a good amount of blue from the book showing through the black so the colour scheme on the outside and the inside tied together nicely. There was a little bit of tweaking, but I believe I got their in the end.

And here are a few trials, trying to apply typographical elements to the cover

Open publication - Free publishing - More layout

The issue here is that the black is true black and not a mixture of black and the spot colour I've chosen for my books, so it seems light grey as a pose to the rich black it should be. I started with huge type for the title, mimicking the way the header type is presented in the book. I thought I best try it smaller though and unfortunately it just doesn't work. Compared to the contents of the book it would feel tame and wouldn't exploit the typeface that Dave has designed for me thoroughly enough.
Once I'd gotten typography to the stage I was happy with, large, running across three lines, I tried to recreate this using hidden truth. I like the way that the word truth runs awkwardly between the two lines, it creates a nice aesthetic because it sticks to the same rules as the conspiracy section of the book.
I spent a while designing the spot varnish overlay for the eye as well, I wanted the spot varnish to subvert the message of they eye, which on it's own represents seeing, vision and truth. Adding a triangular spot varnish turns it into the all seeing eye symbol of the Illuminati. I experimented with a fully filled in triangle with space for the eye and a bit of 'light' gleaming out of the top, but I quickly realised how tacky this looked and went for the simple triangle by it's self. I think this gave it enough for observant people to realise what it means, without over complicating the image.

At the end of this section of development I added in some quotations looking through at this website: Quotes

Ones that I feel are appropriate are :
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. --George Orwell

There are two ways to be fooled: One is to believe what isn't so; the other is to refuse to believe what is so. --Soren Kierkegaar

"It's not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true." --Henry Kissinger

When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.-- Dresden James

I think of all of these my preference lies in the Henry Kissinger and Soren Kierkegaard quotes because they both speak of a duality between truth and deceit that feels very appropriate to the book. So I tried both of them out. I stuck with the Soren Kierkegaard quote because it puts some context to my book; the spot varnish things, labeled hidden truth are called into question as the truth, as is the rest of the book.

I then started tidying the cover design with the eye behind it up, ensuring that all the blacks were the same. I started out with a spine that had the book name and author name on it, but I realised with the stitching technique I was going to have to use (2 up saddle stitch) having a spine would involve a much more complicated gluing proccess involving gauze etc. it's much easier just to remove the spine and put the details elsewhere. I also reduced the size of the type for 'conspiracy' and 'hidden truth' so they sat more within the page rather than consuming the whole page. They became quite a neat rectangular shape and the geometric triangle sat upon this in a much more complimentary way.
I also sat the name of the book and my name down on the page in much the same way the title and page numbers move throughout the book. I though this created a nice symmetry between the cover and content.

Open publication - Free publishing

Below is the cover without the spot varnish overlays:

Open publication - Free publishing

Here's me working on the
hand, I didn't try out too many things with this because it started looking how I wanted it to pretty quickly.




Here is the cover layout I'd become very happy with when the eye was in the background, but with the hand image applied to the front. It just doesn't make as much sense as the eye. Even with the triangle inside it, it just seems to obscure and not as tight conceptually.


And finally, here is an abstract version with a picture of space I'd been using for one of the 'splash' spreads, again it's just a bit obscure and doesn't have as much symbolic meaning to do with truth and lies as the eye does. The eye with the triangle also links really well with the Illuminati symbolism.

Poster layout deveopment and crit

Open publication - Free publishing - More temple

Heres some progress I made just in one day doing a similar aesthetic to the booklet I was working on but with a fold out poster format. I stupidly didn't put an outline round the images so it's hard to see the boundaries of where the posters stop, but you get an idea of the way the layouts work. I looked at using scale circles to indicate peak population and death toll which worked quite nicely. I also tried bars that indicate the same through length rather than diameter, but it didn't work as effectively in this as it did in the booklet format I showed in a previous post. I knocked this altogether really quickly so it's not very well documented because I couldn't document as quickly as I was experimenting, but ultimately the last couple of designs on this spread, I personally think work the most effectively for the most part. There's an issue with hierarchy though because the facts run along the top, though your eye is drawn straight to the huge header beneath it. The header is priority I guess, but if this is the case then whats the purpose in having it run a long the top. I need to find a way to resolve this so I can move forward. Also I've kind of run with this, and I do think it's a strong concept and something that's very strongly associated with the Peoples Temple and also it permeates into pop culture quite strongly, drawing on a collective reference system of signifiers that I imagine quite a few people will have, but perhaps I need to look at different ways of visually representing this? Also look at different fonts and really tweak the typography in the body copy.



CRIT

Ok so yesterday I had a crit, below are some pictures of my feedback forms and the poster layout I brought. I also brought, although they're undocumented here, my final spreads just to get some last thoughts before I begin to design the spot varnish overlays for them.






Results:
Generally very positive feedback, liking the visuals of what I was doing. Two main points:
-The book might be beginning to take up too much time. I agree with this, I'm going to work quite quickly with the spot varnish overlays in order to finish this project quickly, it's essentially a case of getting the right signs and symbols as well as phrases and just tweaking the layout for them so I can wrap this up quickly.
-With the cults brief, it doesn't neccassarily have a context which could mean I'm actually just designing for myself. I think my argument to that would be that this brief is actually about print proccesses and an exploration of that, the content and context takes a back seat to a volume of experimentation with print proccesses.

Exploration of Blue for conspiracy thoery book

2758 UP


2768 UP


282UP

I switched to this image to get a clearer Idea of the blue at it's richest:

2768 UP


2758 UP


282 UP


300 UP


303 UP

I think that as it heads towards 303 UP it gets too green, a good place is 282 UP or 2768, they're both really deep rich blues and work quit effectively with the context. Personally I feel that 282 is perhaps a little too dark, it doesn't work as well in the duotone imagery as 2768. So I'm going to run with that.