This week was focused on eBooks, which are just digital versions of books. For this week’s blog, I wanted to explore print design, particularly the editorial design of certain designers and publications mainly for inspiration on how to approach editorial design.
Neville Brody is an English graphic designer best known for his work on The Face magazine. His work is very post-modern, using a lot of expressive typography and graphic elements. I particularly like this spread about the rise of African Pop Music. The mix of more standard columns of typography mixed with the explosive marks contrasts really nicely, creating an expressive feel without sacrificing readability. I also find his use of the words “AFRICAN UPRISING” really interesting, using them more as forms rather than a means to deliver content. What I think is most important for me from Brody’s work is that you can have these expressive and stylised components while still having legible, easy-to-read content, which I’ll strive to do in my own work for this project.
Alexey Brodovitch is a Russian-American designer best known for his work on the Harper’s Bazaar magazine. What I think Brodovitch does extremely well is use his typography to compliment his images, with the typography forming similar shapes to those seen in the images. This is extremely effective and brings a real elegance and sophistication to what is otherwise fairly simple typography. The important things here is that it’s not overdone, the type just adheres to the basic shape of the image as to not overcomplicate the type. This keeps it legible and easy to read while still having unorthodox alignments. Unusual typography is something I am considering exploring in this project so keeping in mind this work and making sure to find a balance between style and legibility will be essential to effective typography.
Octavo Magazine was a typographic magazine design by Mark Holt and Hamish Muir under their firm called 8vo. While only running for 8 issues from 1986 to 1992 it features some incredible displays of editiorial design. The 88.5 edition is one I find particularly interesting, as almost all the typography is at 30 degree angle to the orientation of the page. The columns of text are almost used as shapes themselves, surrounded by images and notes to create clumps of planes in a Müller-Brockmann-esque play on typographical arrangements. I really like the use of type as a form here, going beyond just larger text placed in the background, but actually using the columns as the forms themselves. It’s a really interesting way of arranging type and something I could see myself explore in this project.
