Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema
Type-only book
“Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey is a feminist text identifying and critiquing the use of male gaze in film.
I created a book using only type and no image that reflected this text and supplemented it through intentional design choices.
My intention was to create a modern design interpretation of this historic text, and making it more digestable to new readers.
I did research on unique type design choices used in books, considering the context of the book and why the choice was made. I found these choices super interesting: the pops of color differntiating the title, the exaggerated outside margin, and the the very large text catching the viewers eye.
I also was interested in book size and shape. Here are some early title page and spread experiments:
I chose Louise and Le Murmure as my title, heading, and number fonts because they were subtle and readable display fonts. I feel the sharpness of Le Murmure speaks to the context and seriousness of the reading while Louise’s calligraphic nature complimented and balanced it out.
The body text is Karrik. I wanted to use a sans serif to represent the modernity of the text and I felt this specific one felt clean and bold which I enjoyed and fit nicely for this project. The overall color of the type on the page had a strong presence.
My main design choice was having a very close top and bottom margin, while the outside margin was very large. I did this to represent the space that I feel this text has taken in feminist and film literature, while giving space for readers to easily digest this text and add their own notes and annotations, as I so enjoy doing when reading academic texts like this.
Then I highlighted quotes that I felt were important in red and allowed them to break the barrier of the margin, breaking up the text and emphasizing certain parts.
The page numbers mirror the vertical quality of the section dividers, which are meant to put this text in a modern design and create a more interactive reading experience to break up the long academic text.
