Starting The Cults Brief

After doing some research into the cults I wanted to look at for this brief I decided upon The Peoples Temple, The Manson Family, Scientology and The Raelian Church. Using the content and information I discovered in that researching phase, here is how I progressed with the people's temple so far.

Peoples Temple -'reaching a maximum of 3000 members'-http://www.caic.org.au/biblebase/apocolyptic/jones.htm -death toll 914-http://www.angelfire.com/ms/perring/russo.html -Spiritual leader- Jim 'Dad' Jones. -Spiritual home. Jonestown Guyana -Core beliefs= Mixture of Communism, Socialism and Pentecostal Christianity -founded in 1955 -ended 1978 (at the time of the Jonestown Massacre) -The use of cyanide-laced Grape flavoured Kool Aid to kill its members has led to the phrase 'Drink the kool aid' which means to blindly accept or believe in something without questioning it.


Looking at the drink the kool aid aspect, which is the most significant, here are some marks that might be interpreted as water/liquid.

And what follows is quick digitised versions of 'Drink the kool aid'. I'd seen the font 'bebas' or something similar used in quite a few things recently so I wanted to play around with that. Anyway heres the result, I used the purple colour to simulate the grape colour of the kool aid that the temple members drank. I also started messing around with a wave shape to simulate liquid. I thought that this was quite effective, but there was something missing from the design that would make it great, it felt a little flat.



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I started to focus on the content on the inside of the booklet, I was inspired by some work Joe Gilmore showed us from his studio Qubik:



The fold isn't centre, but a bit to the left, creating this unique look where some information from the inside is permanently on display down the right edge of the page. This is a unique way to display small and simple bits of information. I thought I could use this to display the small facts about the cults, like their leader, spiritual home, peak membership and death toll. Heres the progress of that:

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I got some content from this website: http://www.religioustolerance.org/dc_jones.htm which summarised the whole moevement quite quickly. I did some editing and put in the bit about the cyanide laced grape soda because I thought it would make a nice pull quote to summarise the whole piece. Creating a unity between the wave imagery and the subject matter: I started to mimic the shape of liquid to create a quotation space and this quite quickly created an interesting visual effect, after a few bad ideas, the booklet quickly took shape to a point I'm happy with.

Content and Credits pages

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Here are some developments I made for my contents page and the credits at the end of my book. I started by putting in this weird image of space that I'd monotoned, turned into a triangle and simulated the Illuminati symbol with. After playing around with that for a while, I realised that it actually wasn't working all that well. So I opted for a very simple and stripped down option, that I feel suits the content of the rest of the book. I then played around with where it should sit in the page. The one I decided on is about 7 rows of 16 into the page, just above halfway, and aligned to the right, this is because from where the page number sits, your eye is drawn to roughly this spot on the page anyway, and so as hierarchy it sits quite well.

In terms of the Credits, theres a lot of information, and I wanted to maintain the minimalism of the book inspite of this, so I stuck to the grid quite rigidly in order to create white space around each bit of information and allow them to breathe. The layout I opted for in the end creates a nice diagonal line where the columns finish from the end of the word credits towards the bottom left. This looks aesthetically pleasing, and the hierarchy works because of the point size of the word 'credits' and the way the diagonal line discussed earlier draws your eye down and across the information.

Colourways

Here are various different colourways that I tried. I started with pantone 2758 UP and then used the hue and saturation tool in photoshop to get a vague idea about the potential colours I chose this spread because it demonstrates the colour at it's most vivid. I feel that the original colour is probably the strongest, though turquoise and the blue-violet colour also work quite successfully. From this I've concluded to continue looking at the dark blues in the pantone chart. The darkness of the blue looks more sophisticated than the more vibrant colours on display, whilst the browns really don't go with black. The dark blue also reminds me of the UFO and conspiracy books I was looking at as part of my research. As I've said before, I feel it's important to get the balance between these books and contemporary cultural books and magazines.

Selecting a typeface for the bodycopy.

OK, so an impromptu crit with people like Tim and Dave lead me to the conclusion that the font I'd started working with (helvetica neue) was too heavy and didn't compliment the open and spacious nature of the font Dave had designed for me. The roundness of the counters and the thin line weight made helvetica look kind of clunky. SO I went about looking at a variety of typefaces, as well as playing around with leading and lines-pacing.


Above is century gothic at 7.5 pt, standard leading and 9.6pt linespacing. The roundness of the counters along with quite a low x height compared to the set width creates a nice even and symmetrical type face to work with. However, it did feel a little tight, so I'll need to increase the leading and/or the linespacing a little.

Above is New Circle, again it was reasonably well rounded, the 'w' in the font also looks like the 'w' that Dave had designed for me, which would create a nice parallel. My issue with this font is that even at +30 leading the font looked very tall and thin, rather than nice and symmetrical like Century gothik, creating quite an elongated feel that didn't compliment the title font too much.

AvantGarde was similarly rounded like century gothic, however the line weight and the sheer size of the bowls of the letters made it feel a little unnatural and very odd next to the title font for some reason.


Eventually following the process of putting the different typefaces next to the splash image to make a spread to see how they worked as part of the booklet I got to making a 'yay' pile and a 'nay' pile. The nay pile consisted mainly of clunky fonts I thought might work like Basemono, which kind of simulates a typewriter. I thought this might echo the sentiments of some of the people I interviewed who associated conspiracy theories with 'classified files' and things of that nature. Other 'nays' included gill, which looked far too formal and academic and p22 underground, which looked almost bold, it was fairly hideous to look at.





And finally some notes I made on the decisions I was making with input from Dave and Ian. I've decided to go with Century Gothic at 7.5 pt with 10 pt line spacing and +10 leading, allowing the font to breath a bit and balance well with the header font.

Rationale and that

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Criting my work

Ok so I printed out the spreads I'd worked on so far and asked for feedback from some of the typography specialists on the course:










I laid the spreads out and then asked Liam, David Gasi, Tim, Ian and Ross to give me feedback and scrawl where there are issues on the spreads.

FEEDBACK:




Liam and David gave me the most feedback/things to work on which is great. The first obvious and most glaring mistake I made was the rather large widows at the bottom of my paragraphs that reduce the readability of the text. Things I can do to alter this: tweak the point size by fractions, edit my body copy to demonstrate. David also felt that the font I'd used for the body copy was too heavy and the leading was too tight compared with the large open title font he had designed, he suggested trying more rounded and open type faces like avant garde (the base font he used to develop his own). I haven't tried different type faces out yet so this is a good starting point once I return to it.

They also suggested that the title to 'Little Green Men' didn't appear gridded like the rest of the page, making it a little unbalanced and odd looking. This is something I need to fix, I realise it does look a little weird.

Other suggestions from them include try playing around with the line spacing. remove the word 'pg' from before the page number, because it's a little self explanatory and trying to work on the assassination and death layout so the word assassination isn't broken up.


Tim was a little less critical, he also noticed the widowing and again suggested I should tweak the point size. Finally he also suggested the pg number bit should be changed, but his objection was that the p was a capital and it would look better lowercase. I guess these things are tiny but they're useful things to tweak and try out.

He, I an and Ross were worried about the widowing on the individual lines of a paragpraph, occasionally the word would just out a little further than most and the eye would be drawnt o that compromising readability. There's a few ways to get around that; play with my body copy (I wrote it, it's not normally something I'd be able to do with someone elses words though), tweak the point size and leading or justify the text. I'll probably try all 3, but I'm worried that justifying it will create rivers of white space down the page. The shapes of these rivers can be quite distracting and compromise readability.

Anyway this miniature has given me a lot to play around with so I'll post that as I go with it.

UV ink nightmares//paper nightmares.

Ok so 2 big blows came today;
-Firstly, I tried to order the water based ink from the website from an earlier post who i had a bit of correspondence with, crucially I forgot to check if they shipped to the United Kingdom. They do not. Subsequent to this, I couldn't find any distributor of the same ink in the United Kingdom. This means that my contingency plan of spot varnish is probably going to have to come into play. I need to figure out how that might effect the way I address the layouts before I overlay these images over the top. I have to avoid making it too busy so simplicity may be key.

-Second problem was sourcing paper, myself and Jonny went through the swatches and samples I was given and decided we'd like to order some that fit both our requirements. This would have gone well if it wasn't for the absolute nightmare it was to eal with the woman and Antalis Mcnaughton over the phone. She seemed to have very little idea what was going on. Anyway, Jonny has posted in detail about it on his practice blog so i won't go into it too much. Anyway when we came to it, the cost would be over £100 so $50 each, which is about 5 6ths of the budget I've allotted for myself. I can't really manage this, printing costs and manufacture all under budget, so I guess I'm going to have to make a compromise and try it out on as many different paper stocks as I can come across.