“Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella.” – Jack Kerouac
Most of this semester we have used shape, color, grids, and type to communicate as clearly as possible. Of course, this is only one approach to design. For this assignment, you will use type in an expressive way, employing a variety of typefaces, weights, styles, sizes, and placement to set a haikus by the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694, seen above). We will print and bind the results into a book using traditional stab binding next week in class.
Your challenge is to balance legibility with expressiveness: how can you create a readable book while also expressing the flow and sentiment of the source poem? Consider the type experiments of the Dadaists and Futurists, and the work of Ray Gun Magazine founder David Carson, as well as your interpretation of the poems and any other research you might do.
PROJECT REQUIREMENTS
- Select 3 poems to design from this list, each on their own page.
- Pages should be letter size (8.5 x 11”) in landscape orientation, leaving a 1.5” margin on the left side to accommodate the binding, ½” margins on all other sides.
- We can’t print full bleed, but will trim ½” from the top, right, and bottom once the books are bound.
- Black only; no gray, no color.
- You can use any combination of typefaces and styles, but remember how much you can accomplish with a single typeface!
- Bring your finished pages, exported as PDF files with all type converted to outlines.
STAB BINDING TEMPLATE
You can also set your own template, or find one you like in “Cover To Cover”!
GRADING RUBRIC
10pts: Does the project meet basic requirements (correct size, file format and naming, etc)?
30pts: How well does the projects demonstrate technical application of tools and techniques? What is the overall level of craft and presentation of project?
30pts: What is the overall artistic quality of the project (attention to composition, color, form, and other art/design considerations)?
30pts: How well does the project demonstrate a personal, unique, creative investigation into the assignment’s prompt? (This is the place for creative rule-breaking, hacking, and otherwise making wonderful, surprising, beautiful/ugly things.)
DUE DATE: Thursday, October 16