03 Typography:
ISTD Invisible Cities
Project brief
The ISTD project brief 3 is to design a book (Invisible Cities) to be republished with a "radical retelling" with using typography as a vice to visually explore each city and imitate their characteristics. Either a book or be a virtual experience can be used to create the retelling of the story. The task is to define a context, identity a target audience and build a strategy that builds on the outcome of the story. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is not an everyday type of novel as the book contains no structural plot nor character development. It instead is a collection of tales to describe different fantastical cities which are documented by explorer Marco Polo with reference to the cities under emperor Kublai Khan. Each city is divided into different themes and in this project a desktop version is created in inform the visual narrative.
Deliverables
1. Strategy
2. Research & development
3. Type
4. Specifications (grids, column/text box measures, typographic treatment, colour palette)
5. Final layouts
Rationale
With using typography as well as way finding as visual vices I aimed to create a virtual experience for a selected number of cities for the user to experience. This informed why a website was created to give a radical retelling of the novel, it allows a more updated and current approach to the dated novel and is more accessible to people around the globe to be able to discover the cities that Marco Polo describes. By using way finding as a device it allows to viewer to similar travel through the website and immerse in a journey of their own. By using typography and manipulating it in order to visually portray each city it creates a different mood for each city presented.
Strategy & Research development
Initial researching was highlighting and identifying key words in each city and using that as inspiration to inform what visual style would inform each city. The strategy explains why a web page as the redesign was chosen as to help update the current printed book. Also work in progress developments shown in order to see how the web pages progressed
Type
Specifications
The specifications aids in seeing the structure of how the webpages are played out with also seeing the different fonts and sizes that are used to help create each page. The colour palette and font choices for each city are all used to inform how the cities visual mood should come across in oder to get a better understanding of that city and visually entice the journey of the user.
Final web pages
Web walk through
