Wednesday, 11 November 2015

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.



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