The first part of the assessment involved choosing typeface selections for the book which we would display in a poster. For the body text, I chose Tisa  because it is a serif font which makes for good readability in large bodies of text. A standard x-height and normal stroke variation also help with legibility. It also had a contemporary feel to it due to the serifs not being too pronounced.

Regarding the display texts, I went with ITC Tiffany, Proxima Nova, Gobold and Cortado for each essay title. ITC Tiffany has pronounced serifs and major stroke variation, which was fitting with the time period in which the essay was released. It also made sense in the context of what the essay was about, which mentioned (among other things) that stems should be thin like a wineglass. Proxima Nova was chosen for the second essay because it is a sans serif, geometric font with no stroke variation. This was appropriate since the essay discussed grid systems. Gobold is a condensed, sans serif font which complimented the third essay nicely. That essay talked about scientific research into the readability of text, and one of the things discovered was that extremely condensed and long lines of text made for greater reading efficiency, so a condensed, geometric font made sense here. Cortado was used for the title of the fourth essay because it is a script font. The fourth essay explained why expressiveness in typography needed to be brought back, so a script font seemed appropriate here as it felt "more human".

Once I'd chosen the typefaces, I got to work on the poster. Unfortunately, there was some confusion here because when I read the assignment brief I thought that I was supposed to present one of the essays and only used two typefaces as a result, not realising that I was instead supposed to use all five typefaces. Regardless, this wasn't a mistake I would make with the book.

For the book, we needed to use both the Blurb website and plug-in. Blurb is a printing company that would allow us to print the books off in either Trade Book or Magazine formats. I decided on the Magazine format because it would offer me more flexibility with the larger page size. Additionally, it would seem more natural to include full-spread images in a magazine. It also seemed fitting for my typographic grid, which was structured on using 3 columns.

I used a 3 column grid structure because it offered visual interest and the columns weren't so small in width that it would affect readability. For lots of the pages, I utilised white space as much as I could so that the reader wouldn't be intimidated by large walls of text. Another aspect that helped keep it visually interesting was using photos which filled up the entire page. This is something the reader can look at and find pleasing. Throughout the text, I added ragged lines to the paragraph style so none of the lines jutted out randomly. Hyphenation was removed for legibility. I also added line breaks manually to get rid of any orphans and widows.

Once I'd added my photos and artwork, I added the finishing touches to my book before finally saving, uploading and publishing to Blurb. I ordered the book and it was printed!