Pierre Cardin: Booklet
Brief: Design a booklet for someone who knows nothing about your design hero. You will gather, curate, and craft text, images, typography, and several other elements to tell the best story of your hero and their work. How do you make a publication that both delights and resonates with your audience, while also informing and educating them?
Initial Sketches
To start off the project, we created 5 different sketches for the book. I found this process to be pretty helpful because I saw how we were able to focus on the story a bit more, and less on the exact elements of each page. My design hero has a very complex history and legacy, and I think it will be helpful to have a whole book to lay out that story.
Before I got into the 5 layouts, I jotted down some ideas and some very rough sketches just to have a bit more direction.
5 sketches:
I currently have elements of each that I do like and may incorporate, but there is not one overall book that I am really enjoying. I think the main thing I want to incorporate is a timeline that has a more kinetic reading to it, whether that is having the reader turn the page, or having the timeline snake around.
Feedback from Langston and group:
- Branching out on style a bit → try to incorporate a few more elements that are not the flat vector style just to push it a bit more
- Shapes and spaces make it cohesive: make a motive to create consistency
- Bring shapes — more cohesive 3–4 elements
- Maybe shift the page before the end and the third page to show 2 different sides of him
- First cover and table of contents to work with
- Have a table of contents show all the shapes together, and then sparse them out between the pages.
2 Sketches & Story
I spent a lot of time trying to come up with an adequate story for my book. I felt like when I was going through the sketches, it was more about getting all the info into the booklet, but not as much about organizing it.
I want to have the overall story of the book be driven by the phrase “the man who ____” since a lot of people are either unsure of who Pierre Cardin is, or they know him for only a specific work and not his progression. I think the type systems I use will have to really carry this to make sure that it doesn’t look excessively repetitive.
For critique, I chose to keep my booklets in a more sketch form and still have them as thumbnails. I feel like this will give me some flexibility going into I design and as I really hone in on my story.
Feedback from Alice and group:
- Cut out the space and show movement into space
- When things aren't framed by a circle, or there isn’t a circle present it changes the vibe → could use this for the end of the book
- Like the spiral timeline more than the circular one
Typesetting & Fonts
As I was working through my spreads, I did a few typesetting paragraphs just to see what would look the best when I would print. To me, the 8.5/10.5 type looked the best, but I think I might change the leading later.
For fonts, I wanted to pick a more circular font to reference his geometric motif and also have a more elegant quality to it. I also wanted one that
Arboria and Avenir are the two fonts that I chose for headlines, subheads, and body copy, I liked the roundness of both and I think they pair pretty well together.
Type System — STORY
The story I want to tell is based on the fact that Pierre Cardin has been a bit forgotten in the design world, and is mainly known for his work in putting his label on cheaper quality goods. The heading system repeats the phrase “the man who” in a lighter weight. The text underneath
The type system also allows someone to see the full progression of the story by just flipping through the different pages.
Feedback Brett Office hours:
- Play a bit more with the type in the heading → and break it away from the paragraph being attached to the essay — changing the scale a bit
- like the story
- putting the person and label as more centered and significant across the page would be a bit more powerful in its meaning
- during the timeline, moment try to break away from those black lines a bit more
Covers Initial Version
Feedback Brett Office Hours:
When I met with Brett, he mainly said to not focus on the cover or table of contents and solely focus on getting my pages to be where I’d like them to be for right now. He also said to not go in the cutout route because I may be biting off a bit more than I can chew in terms of work. Also, the portrait may be a bit confusing to start with, this portrait might be good to end with rather than begin with. In terms of my spreads, he gave me feedback on how to structure my captions a bit more, maybe focusing on more vertical orientation of the captions. Also, he mentioned how the titles are working right now and require a bit more subtle in the timeline spread.
Physical Manipulation- Sewing
A motif I wanted to incorporate into the booklet is thread. I hand sewed a page in the first attempt on the left, but then talked to Brett and realized that it was too thick. It worked with the bold of the
Iteration 1 of Booklet
Main Issues:
- There is a lack of consistency throughout the pages. Every page seems like its extremely different from the last. I think I need to try and make each
- Right now there are 3D, thread, and cursive elements that are all completely separate from one another and are not really linked into each page. I think developing each page a bit more will help this out a lot more.
Progression of Pages
Cover Progress:
Initally I was going to print on translucent material and then have different things printed on the paper and acetate. However, I talked to Langston and he made a very interesting connection to chocolate packaging. I completely agreed with this and thought this idea might be a bit more inappropriate for this context.
First Page
My process for this page was constantly adding and taking away elements until I felt I had the correct amount of elements on the page.
Timeline Progress
I found this page to be the hardest to complete. Every other page seemed to have a very distinct theme to it, however, this one never really had that in my mind. What ended up driving the page was the circular balance I decided to have on the page. I thought that this referenced ideas I had from my initial sketches in which the timeline was not linear but more circular.
Centerfold Foldout Progress
This page was the most straightforward when it came to working out the process. I had an idea of doing this page and how it was going to be laid out from the beginning. The main work just went into making sure that each object was placed in the correct space and that there was an adequate amount of designed objects on the page.
Printing and Document setup
The biggest challenge with this part of the printing process was in setting up the document to print the foldout.
Space Page
Similar to the centerfold page, for this spread I found the process associated with this page to be pretty seamless and straightforward. This page was very similar to the original thumbnail ideas that I had, so it was mainly fleshing out that idea and then refining bits and pieces.
Label Page
This was the page that I had the most trouble with.
Final Iteration Overview
Reflection
I am very happy with the end result of this project. I think that it ended up being pretty cohesive and a very interesting story. There seemed to be a nice arc throughout the book which made it a nice page turner! Looking back through the process I learned a lot about what helps me at the beginning of the process. I really enjoyed doing a lot of rough sketches and using rough sketches as a brainstorm rather than sketching to propose ideas. Having higher fiedilty helps me talk about my ideas whereas having lower fidelity helps me think of all the possibilites I can work with.
