Typography is poetry (More on Typesetting The Waste Land)
Judging from the response from the people who attended, our first Visual Web Design Masterclass in London this month was a huge success. As a large part of the day was spent learning about typography, both relating to type and to layouts devised from typographic principles, I chose to illustrate the lessons by typesetting The Waste Land, a poem by TS. Eliot. If you weren't able to attend, now is your chance to take a look at the results of my experiments.
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
- To design all but the grid in the browser, not Fireworks or Photoshop
Start by learning about the poem or jump straight to each part below.
The Burial of the Dead
A two-column layout based an archetypal, classical double-page spread. This design also demonstrates RGBa colour and opacity and the background image is from one of Eliot's hand-written drafts of the poem.
A Game of Chess
This layout created from a Fibonacci squares based grid. I will be writing soon about my thoughts on why experimenting with different sources of inspiration for designing grids can produce distinctive designs. In the meantime, I intended A Game of Chess to be dark and mysterious. After-all, it is Where the dead men lost their bones.
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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. For this design I intentionally chose to break from the author's layout of the type and allow the pre-formatted verse to wrap. Note how the various different sizes of text relate to the baseline.
Death by Water
A simple, striking, elastic layout based on the measure. If you look closely at the left edge of the title you will see how I used negative text-indenting to draw the text to the left to deal with the typographical optical illusion created by the lowercase letter 'd'.
What the Thunder Said
An unusual combination of two grids with perspective and scale, inspired by an architectural photograph. Who said that you can't use more than one grid on the same page?
Set yourself a creative challenge over the Christmas break?
I hope that you enjoy looking at these designs as much as I did making them. If you are short of inspiration, or you would like to set yourself a creative challenge over the Christmas break, why not typeset your own version of The Waste Land? Or if you prefer, a different poem? I would love to see the results.
