Setting the Stage Process Book

1 SETTING THE STAGE

SETTING THE STAGE ASSIGNMENT Design a book cover using typography that you have physically constructed.

PERSONAL GOALS Work on 3D construction abilities and get friendly with the world outside my computer screen Manipulate type in physical space with similar considerations that I would use designing digitally (leading, kerning, font style etc.)

Create a cohesive object with justified design choices that respond to the cover image as well as the content of the book itself Consider a book jacket as a design for a three-dimensional object Explore the relationship between photographed type and vector type Maintain personal sense of excitement/ visual delight throughout work process Pay attention to craft and sweat the details

RESEARCH AIRPORT NOVELS My visual research involved exploring both existing book covers and examples of experimental typography. Given my title, Mapping the Interior Realm, I pictured a dramatic novel that you would find in an airport bookstore, so I looked for chunky books with evocative, enigmatic imagery.

The experimental typography that I encountered varied dramatically, and expanded my ideas on what could possibly be used to construct typography and the ways in which those materials could be manipulated to convey a specific idea. I looked at typography made from food, wood, paper, light, reflections, string, dead animals and more.

DISCOVERY FINAL STORYLINE A dentist wakes up from a horrible car crash with memory problems. He can remember who he is and how to do his job, but no longer recognizes his family or his patients.

Learning who he was and they were from his family and patients, but he’s slowly beginning to suspect that some people are not telling the truth about what his life was like before the crash. He tries to figure out who he was and what was happening in his family, and strange items/events in him house lead him to grow increasingly unsure of how truthful the people around him are being.

Mapping the Interior Realm Mapping the Interior Realm Mapping the Interior Realm mapping the interior realm Patricia Ward

mapping the interior realm a novel by patricia ward

Mapping the Interior Realm mapping the interior realm

Mapping the Interior Realm mapping the interior realm

Mapping the Interior Realm

After deciding on my storyline and conceptualizing different elements to focus on and bring into my set, I did mock photoshoots exploring the feasability of various ideas.

I was eventually drawn to using toothpaste as typography, both for the icky quality it evoked as well as the multi-layered potential of putting it on a mirror.

REFINEMENT FINAL STORYLINE I did multiple photoshoots to refine my idea of using toothaste on a mirror. After my roommate accidentaly walked through the background of a photo and appeared in the mirror, I recognized the potential of using a figure in the mirror to produce an evocative and slightly unsettling image.

I continued to refine the way I was using the toothpaste and ran into some difficult technical challenges, breaking a mirror and having toothpaste melt into an indestinguishable mess within two minutes of squirting it out. I went through 16 tubes of toothpaste in the course of this project.

I began to consider the secondary typography as it related to my storyline and the primary typography, as well as the book as a three-dimensional object with inside flaps and a spine.

Some of my later photoshoots made a more concerted effort to explore the potential of the immediate foreground, mid-ground (typography) and background with the figure in the mirror. I wanted each element to evoke an element of the story in a subtle way.

Who knows you better than you?

Amy Petersen was born in Hobbes, New Mexico and is a graduate of Scripps College. She is the best-selling author of novels Waiting for Infinity and Interpreter of Flotsam.

Jacket design by Nicole Fox

Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher, New York.

AMY PETERSEN | MAPPING THE INTERIOR REALM

$30.00 US

The author of the acclaimed Waiting for Infinity and Interpreter of Flotsam returns with a darkly profound new novel.

T

here is not one but five versions of the self that coexist at all times – the person we are, the person we think we are, and the person we want other people to think we are, the person other people think we are.

But what happens when we lose all but the last?

Connor Steichen was a dentist, but that’s about all he can remember. He awakes in a hospital bed having lost the memory of his past, surrounded by people that claim to be his family, friends, and long-time patients. As he returns home, his wife and teenage daughter haltingly begin the ever-expanding process or recounting an unfamiliar past.

Struggling to adjust to a reality he doesn’t recognize, he returns to the one thing he can recall, his practice. But as he resumes his daily conversations with patients, he realizes their image of his past life is subtly but unsettlingly different from that described by his family. This, combined with the unexplained pill bottles he finds in odd corners of the house, and the extra child’s toothbrushes that pop up in different places have him questioning whose version of reality – and of himself – he can trust.

Mapping The Interior Realm is a thrilling novel that combines the uncertainty of Memento and the dark wit of Fight Club. Easily sliding between heartstopping suspense and philisophical investifation of the meaning of “self,” Amy Peterson explores the construction of identity, and the ways in which we allow others to control that identity.

amy peterson I used the red and blue inner flaps to echo the red and blue stripes of the toothpaste. I used Helvetica to imply a cold, clinical, unsentimental mood, and to keep the tone of the book serious.

On my back cover and spine I used elements from the front cover.

I ultimately settled on this image for my book cover. I liked the stark contrast between the foreground and middle-ground elements created by a short focal length, and I liked the way the figure in the background was blurred by the short shutter speed. I also thought that the foreground elements (the toothbrush and pill bottles) had a nice interaction with the mirror and toothpaste, sandwiching them between the physical object and its reflection. It was in the last few moments of my final photoshoot that I developed a method of squirting out the toothpaste so that it wouldn’t drip immediately.

Who knows you better than you?

Amy Petersen was born in Hobbes, New Mexico and is a graduate of Scripps College. She is the best-selling author of novels Waiting for Infinity and Interpreter of Flotsam.

Jacket design by Nicole Fox

Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher, New York.

I used a striped stroke on the author’s image to echo the toothpaste.

I changed out my spine photo to make the level of detail and light quality more integrated with the rest of the photography, and to make it pop out in a textural, icky way on the shelf.

AMY PETERSEN | MAPPING THE INTERIOR REALM

$30.00 US

a novel by amy petersen

The author of the acclaimed Waiting for Infinity and Interpreter of Flotsam returns with a darkly profound new novel.

T

here is not one but five versions of the self that coexist at all times – the person we are, the person we think we are, and the person we want other people to think we are, the person other people think we are. But what happens when we lose all but the last?

Connor Steichen was a dentist, but that’s about all he can remember. He awakes in a hospital bed having lost the memory of his past, surrounded by people that claim to be his family, friends, and long-time patients. As he returns home, his wife and teenage daughter haltingly begin the ever-expanding process or recounting an unfamiliar past.

Struggling to adjust to a reality he doesn’t recognize, he returns to the one thing he can recall, his practice. But as he resumes his daily conversations with patients, he realizes their image of his past life is subtly but unsettlingly different from that described by his family. This, combined with the unexplained pill bottles he finds in odd corners of the house, and the extra child’s toothbrushes that pop up in different places have him questioning whose version of reality – and of himself – he can trust.

Mapping The Interior Realm is a thrilling novel that combines the uncertainty of Memento and the dark wit of Fight Club.

Easily sliding between heartstopping suspense and philisophical investifation of the meaning of “self,” Amy Peterson explores the construction of identity, and the ways in which we allow others to control that identity.

Although it was suggested that I integrate the name of the author by wrapping it around a pill bottle, I thought that that was gimmicky and unnecessary.

In my finalized book jacket, I changed out the cover image and made edits to the typographic features of the inside flaps.

CRITICISM FIGHTING DEFAULT I was primarily critiqued on the relationship between my interior typography with the exterior of my book. Although I would argue that my choices to usa a clinical, fairly neutral design strategy with this typography were deliberate and well-reasoned, I would agree that I could have pushed to have elements of playfulness and created a clearer voice.

I personally would have liked to do one last photoshoot and pushed the letterforms of the toothpaste, having learned a new technique that made them not drip within 60 seconds. I think I could have practiced those letterforms more and been far more considered with the way that I was writing with the toothpaste.

At the end of this project, I was very tired of having my apartment smell like toothpaste, but I feel that I learned a great deal about construction, photography and experimental typography.

NICOLE FOX 2016