»light moderate stormy extreme disastrous«

This book is brewing up. The layout loves, laughs, argues and mourns. ›light moderate stormy extreme disastrous‹ explores emotionality from a typographic point of view: Can a book layout express emotions, turning the pages create tension? Is it possible that the appearance of a text conveys the same emotional information as facial expressions, gestures and volume in the spoken word? To explore these questions, this project became a typographic playground. A dime novel, hot off the press, served as a dummy text. Its 63 pages – filled with excessive descriptions of emotions – formed the text base for twenty typographic experiments. I modelled text, destroyed grids, pulled lines apart and pushed sentences together. I came across anger, jealousy, joy, loneliness… The visualisation of those feelings are tied up in one book, whose title and five chapters hint at an increase to the ever more extreme.

The layout at the beginning as well as the book’s material choices are inspired by the typical dime novel style: staple stitching, cheap newsprint, a two-column layout in serif type. Even the dust jacket is a typographic translation of the dime novel cover. For the typographic experiments twenty layout parameters, such as type size or line spacing are selected. One by one, each typographic parameter is applied to express one or more emotions in a section of text. The first experiments are not very noticeable but the further the book progresses, the more extreme the layout interventions and outbursts become until a peak is reached.

This work aims to serve as an object for reflection on prevalent dimensions of book design and visual storytelling. For me it was a great opportunity to take a closer look at the toolbox of a layout artist and try to exhaust its creative possibilities.