Typesetting The Waste Land
With only a week to go until our first Visual Web Design Master Class in London, I’ve been taking time away from client work to focus on writing all new content that I hope people attending will really love.
It is really important to me that I stretch my own limits when I make content for a new workshop. I hope that if I get excited and passionate about my content, then people attending will do the same.
This time I chose to do something a bit different. I chose to typeset each of the five parts of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. My self-set challenges were:
- To base each layout on a different typographical or layout principle
- To use the same structural XHTML markup for every part
- Not to use images
- To design all but the grid in the browser, not Fireworks or Photoshop
I will write a detailed article about my The Waste Land layouts after next week's workshop, but in the meantime here are screen-captures of each of them.
The Burial of the Dead
A layout based an archetypal classical double-page spread.
A Game of Chess
Layout created from a Fibonacci squares based grid.
The Fire Sermon
A newspaper inspired approach where the column width was based on the measure and the number of columns was dictated by the measure and the layout width.
Death by Water
A simple, striking, elastic layout based on the measure.
What the Thunder Said
An unusual combination of two grids with perspective and scale, inspired by an architectural photograph.
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag
I found working with poetry as subject matter fascinating and if you need an injection of inspiration in your design work, step away from your client work and spend a few hours typesetting a piece of verse.
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