strange and random happenstance

What's interesting about certain projects is what do you do when you're asked to take them further. I remember in undergrad I hated going back and having to re-conceptualize The Cherry Orchard yet again, this time for film instead of stage. Yet I think that was just my underlying hated of that Chekhov play. In fact I think it might be a hatred of Chekhov overall, stupid Three Sisters. But taking something I loved working on to the next level? Well, that's a fun challenge. Here I had to take my paper brochure and repurpose the content as an interactive pdf. Like a "brochure" you could download and watch from the Jane Austen Centre's website. Yes, I had to embrace the digital age while thinking of Austen! I was also required to add new photographic imagery that would be sourced from Getty Images, one that would be rights managed and one that would be royalty free so that I'd learn how to purchase and use the different kinds of stock imagery. But the one thing I was certain of when taking my brochure to the next level was that I still wanted to maintain that special feeling of reading a letter.

Therefore the opening shot was setting the scene of the Regency corespondent. Ink bottles, wax seals, letters, quills, and don't tell anyone that book on the left is actually Cranford. It's our secret OK? This tableaux I created from what I had lying about my office, and yes I'm so OCD that the wax seal is the letter 'A.' While you're not getting the animation here with my static imagery I can easily walk you through it, because the animation is almost secondary to the design and information, just a little something something for fun. If you compare this photo to the one above you'll notice there's now a letter unopened on the desk! It actually flies in from the upper right and lands on the desk and you click on it to turn it over and open it.

And at the click of a button the letter opens and if you're not one of those people who constantly leave their speakers off you will be surrounded by the theme music by Carl Davis to the 1995 miniseries adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. This was to get you in the Regency mood. Because seriously, what fan of Austen can hear that music and NOT get excited? In fact even though my DVD set has the option to watch all the episodes strung together as one I still prefer to watch them as they were originally broadcast and then distributed on VHS with the theme music playing every hour! 

Once past the desk space the design becomes more utilitarian. There's a hyperlink on the lower left to the centre's website and in the lower right a 'previous' and a 'next' button. I still maintain the language of correspondence with the cordial invitation, but again, this is a far more straightforward design. The large section in the center is actually the centre's welcome video which I embedded in the design but which can also be viewed on their website for the curious.

The next few pages are just the information from the previous paper brochure in a new format with added imagery. What I had the most fun with though was the little hidden gems. When you role over the icon of Jane she gets a little speech bubble quoting the opening line of Pride and Prejudice, and yes, it was spoken too! The teacup had the sound of tea being poured. On the following pages the reticule icon had coins jingling and the teapot whistled as it came to a boil, and yes, I know it's a decorative kettle, but it was fun. As for the umbrella icon? That open and closed with the sound of rain. Yes, I fully admit to being a design dork. But I embrace it heartily.

Again this design all came down to the map. Here I could do so much more now that it was interactive! In fact I started to call this my interactive masterpiece because I took Jane Austen sightseeing in Bath to a whole new level! Not only can you click on a dot and bring up facts you can click them all on or off as well as turning the highways on and off to highlight just one route. The details, the facts, the facets, everything about Jane's life and her novels as they are in Bath. The only thing that makes me sad is that between going from CS5.5 to CS6 Adobe really did away with all their interactive content, and they're even now phasing out Flash, which is good in the long run, but that means I can't really view this project anymore as the technology has changed. Therefore it's more a project in memory. Which kind of brings me around to the fact that while this was the culmination of this brochure project it's the first iteration that will have longevity. Technology changes, but paper and ink? Well, they stand the test of time as Austen herself would attest.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Adobe, Bicentenary Ball, Brochure, Chekhov, Cranford, Design, Elizabeth Gaskell, Interactive, Jane Austen, Longevity, Maps, PDF, Pride and Prejudice, Redesign, The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, Website

Since the age of seventeen the effect Jane Austen has had on my life cannot be over-exaggerated. From the time I stepped into B. Dalton and picked up an omnibus of her works to just a few days ago when I was re-reading Sense and Sensibility and reliving that first reading over twenty years ago, Jane Austen has become a part of me. She has informed my sensibilities as a human and inspired me in my life and art. Therefore I couldn't let the two hundredth anniversary of her death pass without comment. Two hundred years since we lost not just a great voice in literature, but a woman who captured the similarities of humanity across the ages and inspired us to all search for our true loves. Over these summer months I'm going to be re-reading Jane's six novels, watching my favorite adaptations, playing a bit of the tourist, and discussing how Jane and her work has affected my own art and design work. I hope you'll all join me in praising Jane, I know she'd be happy to have a ball in her honor two hundred years later. After all, she loved to dance!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:01 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 1817, Artwork, Balls, Bicentenary, Bicentenary Ball, Dancing, Design, Emma, Graphic Designer, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Two Hundred Years

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Published by: Pantheon
Publication Date: January 1st, 2000
Format: Paperback, 709 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Johnny Truant comes into possession of a very odd manuscript written by a man named Zampano. Zampano had spent his life assembling the definitive study of the documentary film The Navidson Record, about the Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Will Navidson and his companion Karen Green who move into a house on Ash Tree Lane with their two young children. The film deals with the startling realization that their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. At first it's just little discrepancies, but soon a door appears. Behind the door is a large and every changing labyrinth thats size is incalculable. They soon start to film their discoveries and even mount a expedition into the depths of the house. The assembled footage is what makes up The Navidson Record.

Only Johnny Truant finds that The Navidson Record apparently doesn't exist. Johnny soon becomes obsessed with finishing Zampano's work, but at the same time he is descending into the same madness that claimed the old man. Johnny is attaching tape measures to the floors and walls of his apartment to make sure they don't move. He rarely ventures out anymore. He is a man obsessed. He finds that above all, he needs to find the house. Finding the house might solve everything.

This book has been logically categorized as if The Blair Witch Project was a book. That is about the quickest way to sum up this book without driving your listener insane. The book is a weird post-modernist twist on literature wherein all the narrators are unreliable and some of them might not even be real. This leads me to the question that is of paramount importance to me, is House of Leaves a parody or is it deadly serious? Are all the copious and minuscule footnotes a parody on academic writing? Is the layout meant to be fun, interactive, and slightly off putting? These two diametrically opposed opinions make the book either good or bad. Because if it's parody it's genius, but if it's deadly seriously, I want to cut the author. It's a dense book that is a slow read because there is so much going on with at least four stories being told simultaneously, and of those I really only like one of them. From a design standpoint it's amazingly done, but design alone doesn't make a book work.

This book is insanely layered and nuanced, meaning, the more you read, the more you find. But the problem I had was that the only storyline I wanted to follow was The Navidson Record. I didn't care about Johnny and his lifestyle of dissipation, or of Zampano, who, let's face it, is seriously just a figment of Johnny's imagination. I don't come by that theory lightly. If you skip ahead and read the letters to Johnny from his institutionalized mother who always believes in the power of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary and marking letters that haven't been tampered with with a check mark and then go back to earlier in the book, there's an entry where Zampano quotes directly from the COED and in the lower corner... is that a check mark? Basically proving beyond a shadow of doubt in my mind that Johnny is writing all Zampano's stuff because he is Zampano.

But narrative aside, I don't think this book was good for my health. You know how there are some books that make you feel what it's like to be insane, to be in the shoes of the character, the thing is, I think this book was actually setting out to make me insane and scarily enough succeeding. Hundreds of pages of tiny footnotes just listing photographers or artists or architectural styles gets to you... and yes, I did read them all. Also, all those architectural styles listed to laboriously drill home and prove that the house wasn't like any other architecture but then having the stairs have a banister and the doors frames... that's contradictory... and yes, this are the little things that seeped into my head in the small hours. Seriously, how long before the cardboard and tinfoil and egg cartoons start decorating my room... Not to even mention how the design made you feel like you had fallen into the book and were trapped in some weird Lewis Carroll world and you where never going to get out and you where never going to be free... I got into some bleak trains of thought with this book, none of them good.

Yet the design of this book is meticulous. If it wasn't for the design you wouldn't have that vertiginous sensation that you were falling into the book. Of course the previous one hundred pages of dense type that softened up your mind to fully lose it was more likely to be affected by stretches of blank pages where there was sometimes only a word per page. One week I would only get through a hundred pages and then the next day I'd get through one hundred and fifty more because of the design. The different fonts to identify authorship made it easy to distinguish whose voice I was listening to and did help to make the book less obtuse. Plus, the subtle blue at every use of the word house and all the minotaur references being in red was pretty darn awesome. But as I said above, design doesn't make a book, unless it's a design book I should point out... the design should support a quality narrative not surpass it. They need to be equal and go hand in glove. I shouldn't be giving a full star to the design and the other star just to the one plot line I liked. This book could have been amazing. Could have been is the key for me. Instead I think I'm a little more off balance then before.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: COED, Design, House, House of Leaves, Insanity, Johnny Truant, Mark Z. Danielewski, Minotaur, The Blair Witch Project, The Navidson Record, Zampano