Exhibition Guide Development - Suffragette Design - Research-led Brief

Some experiments into poetry layouts were then conducted. It was important that they were contemporary styles but also reflected the traditional nature of the poetry. For this reason Caslon has been used for the majority of the experiments. The typeface is classic and has a traditional serif aesthetic, it is also is thin and delicate which is perfect to convey the eloquent suffrage poetry. The original published poems by the suffragists were also examined again, and Caslon is very similar to the typefaces which they had typeset back then.

In the first experiment, the poems has been laid out in several ways on one page - thinking about how different layouts can create different emphasis on the lines when red. The first experiment seemed far too crowded, the layers of text meant that their impact was removed and the styles conflicted. The idea of having an extract of the poem on a separate page came from the poetry publications I researched, and this was experimented with throughout. Having the quote alone seemed to work better, although the design didn't look refined or professional enough, without a specific text layout for the quote.

There were then experiments involving changing the size of the type, to emphasis how the sentences would be spoken. This approach seemed interesting but also too experimental for the serious nature of the quotes within the book. The design aesthetic of the items produced so far has been very rigid and these designs needed to continue that.

As mentioned previously, a lot of the poems have emphasis on light and dark. So an experiment was conducted which involved a black and white divide. This worked figuratively, but again seemed too 'random' and did not match the previously established aesthetic.

Some more refined experiments were then conducted for the main bodies of the poems. The most successful seemed to be design were the poetry was placed under a central title in two columns. This was eventually refined into just one, but it took the traditional poetry aesthetic and enhanced it be a refined and beautifully typeset page. There was some experiments involving colouring the first word of each verse. This was an interesting way of organising the text but it seemed strange to emphasis the first word each time. I began considering that emphasising the important words might be more appropriate and impactful - highlighting to the viewer immediately what is important.

More experiments were conducted in orange, this was to ensure the design was consistent with the rest of the exhibition branding. The extract was layered over the text, which was a technique I found whilst researching - yet this seemed to make some of the text illegible and again seemed to clutter the space.

Thinking about the designs of the posters and flyers, I began looking at ways that the text could be similarly broken apart to mimic the technique. The word light was broken apart and then scaled to be different sizes and turned to different angles. This again did not look controlled enough and didn't seem to have the same aesthetic as the poster designs. I realised that this could be because the experiments were in lowercase and the poster design was in uppercase.

Some uppercase experiments were then conducted. These seemed to work better and created more of a bold powerful aesthetic for the type. The arrangement of the word light was interesting, but it seemed to conflict with the type above. So I decided to take a simpler approach, to emphasis the words being said within the poetry, rather than the imagery created. As Danielle Pender has said for Riposte magazine - without typeographic tricks it makes the writing speak for itself.

Certain words of the type were then highlighted in orange, similar to the 'Words Not Deeds' title. This worked a lot better. The capitals matched the existing designs much better and conveyed a sense of strength and power behind the words. Something discussed before is the repeated lines of suffrage poetry which discuss suffragists and suffragettes as a source of light. This is conveyed by the orange colouring that the most important words of the poetry have been highlighted in. This led to the idea of having a black background, which appeared to work incredibly well to emphasise the quote. The negative space allows the quote to have high impact. Each of the quotes used for the poems will have their own page and will be placed in slightly different places around the page, but will follow a grid to keep them consistent.