Editorial Design

Editorial Design is a class where a designer is paired up with a photographer and given the challenge of designing a spread covering either a positive or negative subject or viewpoint.

For our first editorial spread, I worked with Jackie Allen and we chose to showcase the poem "fa|ll|n's ", a litteral (spelled with two t's) poetics poem from the collection "+|'me'S-pace". Litteral Poetics is a division of psycholinguistics and a method for studying psychic structure in the English tongue from the viewpoint of poetry. The litteral perspective sees language not as a tool, but as an organ that has it's own vital function. The belief behind litteral poetics is that a variety of words can be explained as the different arrangements of a set of atomic characters.

Because the poem is so abstract in it's meaning, we decided we wanted to portray it's mood in our imagery and type. The poem has a feeling of isolation and frustration, which is compounded in the reader when they try to understand the poem. With so many of the alphabetic letters converted into punctuation and symbols, one has to go over the poem many times before they can grasp what is going on. The photo is composed of a bird's nest-like image filled with letters to further reflect the entanglement of meaning and type. It's a cluttered mess at first sight but the message becomes clear when light is poured through it. An excerpt of our poem is arranged to reflect the wispy look of the nest's tendrils, with an explanation of what litteral poetics is on the neighboring page. The whole composition comes together to produce a study of space and type, much as the poem itself does.

You can check out other designs from the class at Positive Negative.