This project was created as coursework for Intermediate Typography in SAIC's Visual Communication Design department, instructed by designer Robert Petrick.
"Seamless" is the title I gave to a book designed in response to the sculptural works of Martin Puryear. Serving as the pinnacle of our Intermediate Type class, the project incorporated all of the skills we had developed at that point in the semester and required careful consideration for a typographic system that would easily span over a dozen pages. Beyond an introductory essay that was to occupy the first half of our books and corresponding bibliographical information, there was little content provided to us — and not much in the way of technical restrictions either. That said, the minimum page width of 8" opposed my idea for an extreme vertical page structure with which I needed to reach a compromise as a result.
The second part of the book was to be a "gallery" of Puryear's work comprised largely of images. These images were sourced from various locations on the internet, and depended on aspects of Puryear's sculptures that each student chose to communicate.
Puryear is best known for his advanced woodworking skills in particular (see above), and it is this and the incredible precision with which these sculptures are executed that guided my design decisions. Superficially, one can identify the persistent motif of staggered vertical bars of consistent width (primarily apparent on the cover and throughout the book's gallery section) as wooden planks — though my communication of Puryear's unmatched craftsmanship extends beyond such a simple visual strategy.
At right is the document grid I arrived at after much experimentation. The spread margins (including the gap between the two pages) is exactly proportional to the dimensions of the book itself, and each grid unit defined is exactly square.
In reviewing some video documentation of the artist speaking of his work, I began to understand the careful planning and deliberate decisions necessary to arrive at such refined results. Many of Puryear's final sculptures have their origins in etchings or smaller sculptures of the same form, though many can be considered standalone works rather than preliminary sketches. With this in mind, I spent the full first week of the project considering document size, margins, underlying grid structure and typography (roughly in that order). At this point I incorporated a baseline grid, which I saw this project as a perfect opportunity to do so for the first time.
The narrow columns that resulted from the vertical orientation of my pages limited my choice of typefaces to condensed styles for body copy. Archivo was selected to fill this role as its width could be fine-tuned to arrive at a safe compromise between legibility and word count per line. Additionally, wider styles were at my disposal to fill the roles of running headlines and subheads. Archivo was implemented more out of technical necessity than expression, so the logical choice was to find some other face to make up for this deficit. Neue Aachen not only echos the narrow body text and overall verticality of the book, but also offers a stylistic nod to old woodcut type.
Once I had set and refined the provided copy, it was the space between these blocks of text that informed many recurring graphic elements present in the publication. My page folios most clearly exhibit this abstract motif, though it can also be seen in section headings (in which each vertical title's x-height is defined by this value, as seen below), the table of contents, and in the stylized dashes preceding quoted excerpts of Maxwell's essay.
Other notable stylistic decisions include superscript footnotes — which are placed within small, vertical rectangles that also absorb the punctuation that terminates each sentence — enlarged quotation marks that enclose quoted passages of the text, and small arrows used to clearly indicate relationships between images and captions. We were encouraged to experiment with these elements to arrive at unconventional solutions, and many endured countless iterations before their current state. The folios, for example, were originally located in the outermost bottom corner of each page margin, and allowed to indent the surrounding body text. ■