Page 1: Great Expectations
Interesting book. A collection of the work of seventy designers who have been asked for their take on the first page of Dickens’ Great Expectations. The results range from ‘straightforward’ exercises in typography and layout to the completely abstract.
We decided that some kind of comparative exercise using the opening text from a novel would be an accessible way to demonstrate what expectations, differences and nuances are possible via typography and design.
The Timson web press used at CPI MacKays’ Chatham plant is capable of printing 2,000 copies of a book in around ten minutes.
Photoshop has made it possible to reveal the true structure of each letter and divide it into the yes/no of black-filled or blank pixels. Split into these polarities, this last ordering process presents the text at the highest possible contrast: a blocky rectangle as the last remnant of the message, 20% of the page covered – 80% the in-between, nothing.
This cheap edition of my books is dedicated to the English people, in whose approval, if the books be true in spirit, they will live, and out of whose memory, if they be false, they will very soon die.
I researched how to slow and inhibit reading. By increasing the leading and using large paragraph spaces, the reader is forced to move gradually down the page, while the right alignment makes ‘speed reading’ almost impossible and slows the pace even more. I set the text in all caps, destroying the word shapes, making word recognition slower and therefore making rereading more frequent.
She advocated that each line of text should communicate only one idea, that short lines make reading easier, that texts should be consistent in length and structured as a series of clauses. Once these ideas are applied, the resulting text often resembles a poem and is more organic in structure than ranged left or justified setting.
Love this decomposition.