Harri Larkin - Context Research

I've been approached by a friend of a friend asking me to design a logo for their band, Harri Larkin which is based in Bristol.

Having spoken to the band about the type of music the band produces, she described it as "alternative indie that's influenced by Paramore, No Doubt, and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers". The bands they referenced as having nice logos were The Ramones and The Sex Pistols, and they like the scratch look of The Libertines and My Chemical Romance, all of which are shown below.

The aesthetic to go for seems to be some sort of scratchy or messy unorganised text with a black and white illustration, the shape should either be circular or horizontally rectangular, doing this things will allow the logo to carry over the connotations of these bands to Harri Larkin, making the logo successful in terms of communicating what type of music the band play, which is important for a new band.

City Under The Floorboards

I was contacted by Simon Pickles who was working on an independent film called City Under The Floorboards, he asked me if I could do a logo for the film.

After seeing the initial sketches people working on the film had made and seeing the mood board they linked me too, I had a rough idea of what sort of thing was needed for the logo.

I e-mailed them the following three screenshots, the logo, and how the logo could work as an image for a social media page.

The layout of the text is similar to one of the ideas they sent me, but slightly more aligned. I incorporated the gender symbols into the double O, making the female one more prominent than the male to represent the control she has in the relationship in the film. The horizontal line from the female symbol separates the top and bottom halves of the logo like floorboards, with the silhouette of a city skyline pointing downwards to try and stress the idea of it being under the floorboards. The lights that are switched on in the buildings are meant to be somewhat of a reflection of the lettering in the top half to try and add balance to the logo. I chose to use Avenir bold because it's quite bulky and clear without being overly masculine.

I'm going to wait until I hear back from them before I do anything more on this project.

A Clockwork Orange Book Cover - Cover Copy

I started by adding in the rest of the cover copy into the golden ratio grid, making the quotes on the back slightly bigger than the rest of the text. I used Futura on the back for continuity, and used the same process for creating my own letters for the quote on the front. I found that with the extra type added to the front, the title text no longer stood out quite as clearly as before, so I changed it to make it more aggressive-looking to secure it's position as first in the hierarchy.

 

Making all the text on the back cover the same size made the page look more balanced than having larger lines of text at the top and bottom. I also found that the title type looks more aggressive when used in conjunction with plain thin lettering because of the extra contrast.

 

The orange penguin logo against the orange spine didn't stand out very well, so I tried inverting the spine colour and the text colour, but this didn't look right, so I instead added a small white block behind the logo, and changed the colour of the text to white instead of the 10% orange in order to match this.

 

I got some feedback that said the main title text was difficult to read, so I added the original brush type in 50% orange behind the more aggressive one, making the text more readable while keeping the aggressive undertones.

The covers look like this mocked up

 

A Clockwork Orange Book Cover - Lemony Snicket and Harry Potter Book Covers

Having looked at the previous Clockwork Orange book covers I was undecided as to if I should use some form of imagery or not. There's a famous saying that a picture paints a thousand words, but a book has hundreds of thousands of words, so surely a single image is not enough to be suitable for a book.

The idea of books is that you use the words to create your own images in your mind, and having imagery can have an influence over what you picture in your mind without you knowing. They can also be quite misleading, for example, the illustrations on the front of the "Lemony Snicket - A Series of Unfortunate Events" books are very similar to the ones on the Harry Potter books, the most successfully sold book series of all time, in an attempt to lead the consumer to think they're similar books.

For these reasons I'm keeping my cover purely type-based.

 

Lemony Snicket - A Series of Unfortunate Events

 

Harry Potter

A Clockwork Orange Book Cover - Layout and Typography Experiments

I wanted to use the golden ratio as the basis for a grid because of how it's natural connotations are shared with an existentialist way of thinking.

After seeing that the colour scheme of the Penguin label was black, white and orange, I decided that I would use orange as the main colour in my design, but it would be more subtle than the use in the three alternate movie posters I looked at in the last blog post. I used the specific orange from the Penguin logo to make a colour scheme to try and make the the labels fit in with the rest of the design. I set out to use black, white, and 100%, 50%, 20%, and 10% tints of the Penguin orange. I found that the 20% and 10% looked more pink than orange anyway, which helps avoid the cliche of using orange as the dominant colour.

I then initially set out the type within the grid, using Futura because of its natural connotations. I increased the tracking to try and represent freedom and individuality within each of the letters, a theme central to the plot of the story. I used the 100% orange for the spine to fully separate the front and back covers to represent the struggle between two sides of Alex's thoughts; his own and the ones created in him by the Ludovico Technique.

I found that by using thinner letterforms the sense of freedom and individuality is increased.

 

Rather than using a lighter weight of Futura a decided to manually create the letters myself by tracing the existing type in Illustrator to further add to the sense of individuality with the imperfections that inevitably come with it.

This allowed me to experiment further with the concept behind the type. I tried using different brushes on the lines to make the text even more imperfect, as well as filling in the counters to try and represent more clearly the meaning of the phrase "as queer as a clockwork orange", which is something that looks normal on the outside but is different on the inside.

 

Whilst the experiment with the counters does communicate what I wanted it too, the block use of the 100% orange makes it the primary colour in the cover rather than the lighter background, which is a bit cliche, so I decided not to look any further into this.

The use of a brush made the text look hastily rushed and slightly aggressive in it's formulation, which fits in with the nature of the story, so this is the typography I chose to go forward with. 

A problem with this is that it's not very convenient to trace all the letterforms manually so I can apply the brush stroke. Fortunately this won't be necessary as the type isn't very readable at smaller sizes, and it needs to be black to make it properly readable even at 12pt, which is very restrictive. Given this, I'll just be using a thinner version of Futura for the blurb rather than my traced version, as more thought will have been put into readability at small sizes for the proper fonts than my own version.

A Clockwork Orange Book Cover - Existing Covers and Film Posters

Film Posters

Given that the design is specifically for the book cover, it may prove useful to look at film posters for A Clockwork Orange to try and distinguish what sort of aesthetic to try and avoid.

The original movie poster is quite iconic for it's obscure typography and the high contrast between the image and the background.

 

Obscure typography and high contrast images are themes across many of the alternate movie posters I found as well (above). Some of them use the same typography, whereas others take inspiration from movie poster designers from around the same period, such as Saul Bass.

 

Avoiding this sort of obscure typography is probably a good idea given the brief specifies that the cover should "appeal to a contemporary readership", it's particularly important to avoid the specific typography from the original poster to try and loosen the link between the book and film, as the two are separate things. 

This brings up a problem with iconic imagery, using iconic imagery from the film such as the bloodshot eye being clamped open and the white clothes is probably avoidable too, as they might be described differently in the book.

Book Covers

The original cover for the book is shown on the left. The use of purple as the main colour is an indication that the word orange in the title isn't primarily referring to the colour orange. This is also suggested by the David Pelham cover for a version published in 1972, shortly after the release of the film. It uses bright colour sparingly but excludes orange. The 1972 colour uses iconic imagery from the film, but I feel like this is acceptable because when it was briefed it probably had to have some sort of link to the film given the date of it's publishing.

 

More recent covers have reverted to obscure imagery that's not necessarily representative of the imagery in the film, or have been a lot more minimalistic in their use of image, if indeed any is used at all.

The use of the colour orange seems to be something that's creeping into the designs, and I feel like this is something which is, to some extent, unavoidable if you're not using iconic imagery, as without it there's not obvious initial link between the design of the cover and the story itself. The selective use of orange against a plain background, while not linking particularly to the story, draws connections between the book the iconic film poster, which isn't necessarily a bad thing as most readers will probably have already seen the film.

 

Conclusions

• Avoid obscure typography
• Avoid iconic imagery from the film
• It's ok to use colours other than orange
• Any imagery should be obscure or really basic
• If using the colour orange, use it selectively against a plain background

A Clockwork Orange Book Cover - Initial Ideas

The brief states that it wants the cover to have an "imaginative concept and original interpretation", and I feel like basing the design on the existentialist undertones of the story fits this well. In doing this it's also avoiding any obvious links with famous scenes from the film such as the white milk bar or Alex strapped in a straight jacket with his eyes held open. This is important because it needs to be clear that the design is for a book cover not a DVD cover or a film poster.

I wanted to concentrate on the strange name of the film as well, which comes from the saying "as queer as a clockwork orange", a phrase that describes the strangeness of something that's appears normal on the outside but is different on the inside. This will force the cover to be heavily typographic rather than image based, which is probably a good thing as the brief specifies strong use of typography. This again keeps me away from using any famous scenes from the film. 

I made some notes of ideas that could be useful themes for the cover or that would benefit the cover with their inclusion after starting from Existentialism and the phrase 'as queer as a clockwork orange' interpreted in the context of the story. These were:

• Use of the golden ratio
• Futura as the typeface
• Unbalanced and imperfect layout
• Customising the typography
• Large amounts of space
• An suggestion of a struggle between good and bad

A Clockwork Orange Book Cover - Previous Research From Dissertation

Reasoning

After reading this article about existentialism and Nietzsche in The Lego Movie I thought it'd probably be a good idea to look into Sartre and Existentialism given they were mentioned in an article that confirmed some of my thoughts. Camus came as extension to through this reading. I decided that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy would be a good place to read from, as it's well renowned for it's accuracy, and is where I started my initial readings on Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer to check they were suitable to triangulate with Nietzsche.

Existentialism

• Jean-Paul Sartre described himself as an existentialist.
• Some existentialists were unhappy as being labeled so, notably Camus and Heidegger.
• Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are seen as the precursors to existentialism.
• Accepting that understanding what it is to be human isn't enough to explain everything that science can tell us.
• Human beings can't be fully understood by science alone though, and adding a morality alongside the scientific understanding still doesn't truly explain humanity.
• Morality and ethics can't be crossed with science and is something that is more or less innate, as is the message behind the film A Clockwork Orange.
• In order to understand humanity fully we must understand natural things like intention, blame, responsibility etc etc.
• Philosophy can't be looked at as an objective science.

Jean-Paul Sartre

• Commonly considered the 'father' of existentialism.
• His initial critics were mainly communists or catholics.
• "The basis of Sartrean freedom is ontological: we are free because we are not a self (an in-itself) but a presence-to-self (the transcendence or “nihilation” of our self). This implies that we are “other” to our selves, that whatever we are or whatever others may ascribe to us, we are “in the manner of not being it,” that is, in the manner of being able to assume a perspective in its regard." (Flynn, 2013) 

What I Gained

Other than gaining a slightly more succinct understanding of existentialism as a whole, I've not really gained much from this, and I feel that this has brought the philosophical element of my research full circle to reach it's conclusion.

Next Steps

If I was to continue looking into Nietzsche's position in philosophy, I'd have to look deeper into, Existentialism and Sartre, and seemingly into Heidegger, Camus, and probably even Marxism, which seems like it could lead to confusion, as well as the general direction of the research heading increasingly away from the Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer core of what I've done so far.

In this sense I feel like now is an appropriate time so start compiling the current research I've done into some sort of presentable structure to base my essay on, picking out key quotes and references. Doing this will allow me to look for specific examples of graphic design that illustrate the points I'll want to make, rather than gather potentially useful examples as I was doing earlier.

Assessing Competition Briefs

The competitions that I considered entering have now all released their briefs, these were YCN, D&AD, RSA, and Starpack. 

I had initially hoped for a packaging brief, so Starpack were the ones I was most looking forward too, however, I found them to all be a bit obscure apart from the Nestle one, which had the opposite problem and was too vague.

The D&AD briefs all seemed either very campaign-based or a bit dull, so none of them really caught my attention, the RSA briefs tended to have the same problem.

YCN were a lot more varied, and I found that The Saucy Fish Co. brief had a good balance of commercialism with fun, and freedom with restriction.

On top of The Saucy Fish Co. brief, I'm also planning on doing the A Clockwork Orange Brief from the Penguin Design Awards. I recently watch this film to try and gain a practical understanding of existentialism for my CoP essay.

Poster For 'Travelling Man Presents BA Hons Illustration Party'

Joe Shiels asked me to design a poster to fill a gap at an exhibition he's helping to curate, 'Travelling Man Presents BA Hons Illustration Party'.

The exhibition is heavily illustrative, and so the poster needed to not overshadow any of the illustrations, so Joe requested it be type only and stuck to the colour scheme of the exhibition. 

I used he golden ratio to try and make it as discrete as possible, this was chosen because of how the golden spiral occurs naturally in nature and the eye/brain thinks nothing of it when we see it. Futura is the typeface used because it’s fairly narrow, allowing me to use just one line for the third line of text while still having it at a large scale. The difference between the cap height and the ascenders also gives it an imperfect feel which matches the grid.