book design - hell

ok, so here's an entry about my book i designed for the 2nd semester at the Duncan of Jordanstone college for 2nd year.

we were given a random 'utopian' place that we had to create a book for. my place was hell. got a few ideas when we first got handed the brief. the cute character illustration was one of my original ideas that i stuck with. i went through thinking of doing the book on past events with illustration done in my cute character style. from there i looked at the different levels of dante's inferno.

***before i go on, i really need to remember to add tags to my entries 'cos keep forgetting!!! 0_0

yeh, so was gonna base my design on that, but the descriptions i could find were a bit vague and quite open so i kept searching while working on this idea when i came across the chinese hell - diyu.

the different levels/stages were a lot more specific and i found easier to work with. this also fitted in with my idea of illustration as my influence for these characters comes from the far east. characters like:

pucca
hello kitty (*did not know this was used as a rebellious symbol in japan!!!)
and characters that :phunk studio do. wouldn't mind working for these people.

and stuff like that. and then wanted to make it clean for reason i'll say later but yeh, really really like this site/these artists and want to make a website as clean and nice as this, so another reason for making a book with clean graphics.

artless!!!!!!!! < (this) = (equals) <3>

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so yeh...   ummm....  points > ...

* i didn't want to use colours as this assumes hell has colour, that we know what that colour would be if colour did exist and also didn't want to do the stereotypical idea of fire, lots of red, etc.

* i didn't want to use characters that looked human because if hell exists how do we know we get there in human form? also, to portray the levels as i wanted, using human characters would have probably started to become borderline offensive, sick and way more unacceptable to the reader. by using cute characters it takes away this problem. i felt i could illustrate these characters with whatever happening to them and it was ok to do so as it is far removed from the human form we can very much associate with.

      - i went to pictoplasma this year with my sister and the talks by different artist from around the world was amazing. one that related to, and influenced my book piece was a talk by 'Marek Michalowski'. he did a talk on 'Keepon' (which everyone should watch!!!!!) which was created for autistic children for them to interact with. a design they had before was a more realistic robot, the the children found it unapproachable and couldn't relate well with it so they re-thought their design and came up with a cute, cuddle and none offensive character that was very approachable not just to autistic children, but everyone who came in contact with this character. another speaker talked about an experiment they did were they had a robot who was very realistically modeled on the scientist who invented the robot. an interesting discovery they observed was that people who came in contact with the robot and then the scientist found that the robot was intimidating and unapproachable.

                                     - this relates to my idea for the book as i wanted to show the extremity of some of the levels without being really offensive to the viewer and by making the characters cute and non-human the viewer is hopefully more engaged. i feel they would have not been if i had used realistic brutal images as they would have had an instant block in their head due to the extreme nature of the images. i feel that the messages portrayed in each scene isn't lost as people can see exactly what is going on.

- maaaaaan, this is turning into a major long post!!! -

* i also didn't want to produce a book that had the usual bind down one side of the book to keep everything together. this is because when i think of books i normally associate the word to pieces of material joined together on one side with loads of text you read left to right or right to left and is also unchangeable. the reasons i did it the way i did was to create layers that people had to unwrap to get to the content and also each level/page/pullout doesn't have to go back in the same order; you can re-arrange them how you want. each page has the chinese characters of each level on the top left so you know which page goes with which.

ooooooh, yeh, a reason for my use of lots of white was because when we try to imagine what hell is like we base it on our own personal experiences that we have had through life. i think this is what we do when trying to imagine something we have never experienced which i think makes the thought slightly innocent/naive. since we have never experienced hell, our thoughts and imaginations of it are essentially innocent and naive and to truly know what it is like we would have to go their ourselves to find out. so yeh, the clean look and the massive amounts of white used in the book is because of our inexperience of the place.

- can't believe i almost forgot the last point as it was one of my original reasons for doing the book the way it is. the innocent/naive understanding of hell is also one of the reasons i went with cute characters. cute characters are associated with children, and children are associated with innocence and naivety and there you have a link.

well, that's definitely enough writing!