OUGD501 - Cover Developments

In started to act upon initial ideas in the production of a publication, the first point of call was to think about a cover. Thinking about my research question - 'does design, in particular, type and layout design, have to be objective to be functional?' - the essay is focused on the debate between objectivity and subjectivity within design, which uses references from the 1972 debate between Wim Crouwel and Jan Van Toorn, as well as from other sources. Since this is known as one of the biggest debates in the history of graphic design, it was decided to use the cover of the original book as the main source of imagery for my own publication, however with some alterations made by myself.

Most of these cover developments were inspired by research into ideas of subjectivity and in particular, the work of Jonathon Barnbrook was of much inspiration. His designs for Adbusters: Design Anarchy magazine make use of handmade and digital approaches to design, combining the two using a variety of different methods. One of these was physically drawing and writing onto images. This approach was taken in these cover designs, printing the original cover of The Debate and almost defacing it like a school textbook.

One idea I had based on this was to scribble over the image of Jan Van Toorn. This was done in order to represent the research question of my essay, which asks if design has to be objective to be functional. Van Toorn was in favour of subjectivity and Crouwel objectivity, therefore scribbling over his picture was done to represent how potentially his ideas are not relevant in terms of graphic design because they do not possess any function (even though this is not the case, as can be read in the conclusion of my essay, however this is simply representative of my initial research question).

Another idea was to hand-write the research question on the cover, with the main words 'objective' and 'functional' being underlined or circled in red pen to show their key importance within the essay in regards to arguments presented. In these variations, 'The Debate' has also been circled in red to highlight this as the premise of the publication.

Out of these initial developments, the one I chose shows Van Toorn's face scribbled over and 'The Debate' circled in red for the same reasons as to highlight my initial research question and the premise of the publication. It was also thought that this worked better in its simplicity than some of the other developments. It was decided not to have the title of my essay on the front cover since this did not seem to fit comfortably anywhere on the cover and it was thought this was not really needed since 'The Debate' was thought to be sufficient enough in communicating what the publication is about, since this is a very famous debate. For this reason, a title page was created after the cover with the research question on just for extra clarity. This was also inspired by the standard layout of typical books which usually feature an imprint page and a title page after the cover before getting to the main content.