making – lesley's headspace

Mysterium Veritatis

Just a little book layout/experiment I decided to do. I’m basically almost done with the skeleton of the Paul/Pollux story, so I’m trying to come up with ideas about how to present the world I’ve built without spoiling the story. The plot twist (i.e. Paul = Pollux) can be made rather obvious and chronological, which is not exactly what I want.

At the moment I’m packaging the entire volume as part of something released by an organization called The Mystery Guild (I used this as a frame for my calendar project. I’ve been working on designing a proper logo for TMG to use in the project). The text in this InDesign document is mostly finalized, but the images are all fillers (just ignore them. Even the logos are just fillers I took from the Internet to act as visual placeholders before I finish the final logos and images).

Right now, I am working on

typography selection for main book (ignoring process book for now)
page layout for main book (paper size, grid, hierarchy)
format for main book (i.e. books within books, translucent pages)
typographic approach for Pollux’s story
how to tell the two stories side by side???
mini branding for The Mystery Guild (logo mostly)

Some ideas I have for the main book

translucent overlays of bone structures printed on tracing paper (or something similar) to be overlaid on anatomical drawings of creatures within Paul’s diary [if you read the previous post you know that Paul is a broke surgeon who makes cryptids for a living, just explaining this in case]
hardcover to be embossed with gold foil and book to be coptic bound so it can flip open easily
one colour accent within the book pages – not going full-colour at the moment as it doesn’t seem necessary
process diary look and feel will probably be informed by the main book, but the aesthetic for the process diary is going to be comparatively more raw (intended because it’s sort of a sketchbook/work-in-progress companion to the final space + book)

I’m going to work on the FYP Report only after I produce more work and experiment more. I haven’t yet found a good way to synthesize all the research I have such that it’s easily understood because I went all over the place with regard to what I was looking at and I’m not entirely sure how to organize it. After I work on more of the book (and do some test prints to see how the layout is shaping up), I’ll start on my report. By then I should be much clearer on how I want to proceed.

PS: Mysterium Veritatis is Google Translated Latin meaning ‘the secret truth’.

Work in progress update

111015 cards_formats

This is how the deck’s going so far in terms of just imagery, and here are some experiments as to how I can lay out each card. I haven’t been all too adventurous yet because I still need my system of organization, but I think I’m leaning towards removing the white frames around each card and having them either fully black with no visible border or fully white.

Janus deck beginnings

I secretly want to flip out that the FYP Viscomm criteria was only sent today, and I feel a little sad that I’m the kind of person who feels reassured by documents even after years of declaring that I’m ready to buck a system that still needs guidelines WHO AM I
I’m actually really liking the starts I’ve been making on the Janus deck and getting a little bit into this wayfinding thing.

So what is this Janus deck? A crafted fortune deck meant to use recognizable tropes from Greek mythology for the seemingly directionless or fearful individual (me sometimes) to divine sensible responses from the gods. Janus is symbolic of beginnings, and personally significant to me because of how I kind of needed a new beginning for my project as well. (I will draw more bizarre-looking cards, I promise. I know these two are terribly tame, but they’re very early experiments.)

Here is my to-do list.

Read up in greater detail on Greek mythology (this means another trip to the ADM library), symbolism, divination, etc. to beef up the research basis of my project
Make more cards, with increasingly bizarre imagery, with more Harry Clarke/Beardsley influence. Grotesque readings over the past two months will back up my illustrative style.
Start working on book ideas. Make first, think later. Probably going to try incorporating dioramas and foldouts in my book because I want to draw a lot of things, and I pinned a lot of creative layouts and they’re really inspiring me.

The way I’ve been working is sort of an adhoc make first, conceptualize later thing so I can fulfill my almost neurotic compulsion to feel productive. Making also helps me calm my thyroids (or wherever my FYP anxiety is stored). I’ve been chasing after this lofty idea of The Perfect Most Beautiful FYP Concept Ever and that probably curtailed my desire to do anything, since it didn’t live up to whatever vague castle in the air I had in my head. The more I make the more material I have to choose from, which is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing anyway. More cards tomorrow, more book-related thoughts, and hopefully back to some kind of professional standard of blogging that doesn’t sound so much like a stream of consciousness.

Scylla and Charybdis diorama

I made this in one day, so that should reassure me of the speed of my work and remind me that I don’t have to panic and that I can do anything. It’s about the size of an A6 sheet, working smaller because it’s just a draft. I’m thinking of incorporating dioramas into my bookmaking process, along with fortune telling and the grotesque as a medium to convey monsters like Scylla and Medusa. I have yet to flesh this out properly but it feels like all the pieces are slowly, slowly coming together, even if I can’t tell how that will happen.

Edward Gorey’s Fantod Pack

Since he supplied us with a visual vocabulary for cutesy dread over many decades, perhaps it comes as no surprise that Edward Gorey designed a set of whimsical tarot cards. The set is called the “Fantod Pack,” the word fantod signifying “a state of worry or nervous anxiety, irritability” and thus possibly the most Edward Gorey word ever. (David Foster Wallace was fond of the word as well, using the phrase “howling fantods” multiple times in Infinite Jest; the main clearinghouse website for DFW information is called The Howling Fantods.)

Not surprisingly, Gorey’s tarot set is (a) not precisely a tarot set, (b) reflexively downbeat, (c) more like a parody of a tarot set, and (d) utterly hilarious. Seriously, and I know that he is known for this style of humor, but looking over the Fantod Pack will give you a whole new appreciation for the possibilities of the deadpan mode of humor.

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/edward_goreys_tarot_card_set

I found this idea (unsurprisingly) on Pinterest and it’s slowly helping me reignite my desire to do something cool for FYP. I love how Gorey adapts the tarot tradition in his own humorously grim style and it encourages me to want to adapt my own card pack in a similar fashion (but in a way that suits my theme). I love esoteric kits and strange objects and I was looking at that again as a way of anchoring my theme in a concrete place. I’m going to make several small projects inspired by the ideas I’ve gathered on Pinterest and use some text by Italo Calvino as inspiration. Hopefully by immersing myself in making, I’ll overcome the ennui I’ve been feeling and get on track to progress!