OUGD501 - Subjective Layout Ideas and Development

In further thinking about what makes a subjective piece of design, initial layout sketches were also composed to figure out how potentially content could be formatted on the page in contrasting ways to that of my objective ideas and developments. In contrast, these show a lot more random layouts, without consideration for the grid, which can be seen in the overlapping of text and images in various, potentially compromising ways.

In the development of these sketches, it was first thought about content. It was decided that there should be a mix between secondary and primary images in order to make the publication more informed in that this would include my own responses to arguments presented within my essay further from the overall idea of the publication. In the development of subjective pieces of design, experiments were done using processes such as scanning, copying and further printing over content to reveal various results that were mostly unpredictable.

These were then placed digitally within the publication to experiment with how they would potentially fit within the layouts and alongside the written content. This involved further collaging images together, a process inspired by subjective designers' way of working, such as Jan Van Toorn and David Carson. In these developments, it was decided to keep the text within the same columns present in the objective layout ideas since it was thought that this could potentially produce a small element of consistency throughout the publication which would help link it altogether. However, as other developments showed, this text could be kept within these columns and yet still be formatted in various subjective ways.

Another idea was to include initial design brainstorms into the publication to show how my ideas were inspired by research and arguments presented in my essay to put ideas of objectivity and subjectivity into practice. The layout of these were considered to be partially subjective in themselves through the drawing and labelling of secondary images, therefore were thought to fit well within the theme of the publication.