Partner Project with Elise Sansbury
Role
Grid Systems, Type Setting, Visual Storytelling
Category Grid Systems, Type Setting, Visual Storytelling
A newspaper reimagining a “This American Life” podcast episode about the strange phenomenon of how Americans tend to gravitate towards simulating things outside of our immediate experience, such as wax museums, civil war reenactments, and many more. So in the ideation process, it was decided to borrow from that same concept as we put together a physical newspaper for the podcast, each act separated to resemble the visual language of what example is being talked about. The prologue mimics the telegram letters of the Civil War. The acts simulate travel postcards, museum placards, and medieval books respectively, and finally finishing with the visual look of a news anchor script for the conclusion. Since it was the first of many times collaborating with a partner, project management became a huge part of how the production process could be nailed down smoothly, but were able to create a distinct set of rules to ground the fluctuating visuals, and to still bring the publication together as one.
Splitting each act between each other, then coming back to debrief and rethink details so the overall visual zones of interest still aligned was a challenge to maintain a grid system while opening up the possibilities of miscellaneous additions that enhance the narrative to truly capture the experience of reading a newspaper, and having those common zones of information became really important in doing that. This meant a clear type pairing system for the main body, and a distinct setup for the letter heads of each spread, so when a person flips through the papers, they experience the simulation of each act without getting completely lost.