Illustration

ISTD (2018)

Best before: Fresh & Stale

Overview

International Society of TypographicDesigners (ISTD) is a professional body run by and for typographers, graphic designers and educators. Membership is awarded to practising designers, educators and graduating students who demonstrate, through the quality of their work, their commitment to achieving the highest possible standard of visual communication. For ISTD I chose the ISTD: Food for Thought brief. I separated my project into two books, exploring both the best and the worst of bread.The title of the project, Fresh and Stale, represents the two different ways to explain the same piece of bread. Dual narrative plays a big part in this project.

Fresh

Fresh is a typical book, safe and orderly and in complete contrast to the chaotic structure of the second book, Stale. Fresh celebrates all that is simple and clean. It has the feel-good factor and, like the smell of fresh bread, it is comforting and wholesome.

Stale

As I was studying bread, I quickly noticed a lot of articles about the link between gluten, a component of almost all bread, and mental health — in particular schizophrenia. In Stale, the increasing deconstruction is loud, obvious and impossible to ignore.Throughout Stale, the disintegration focuses on the letters b,r,e,a and d.The destruction of the text in the book is gradual, then quickly spirals out of control and the text becomes almost illegible.This results in the text reflecting the mind’s inability to function normally due to bread.

Exploration & Exhibition

As a side project to the book I created an exhibition of work. It was a dramatic exploration of the loss of gluten in my life since I stopped eating it. I physically printed famous poetry about loss onto bread wraps in the Letterpress in NCAD. I then hung the wraps from the ceiling of the exhibition to appear as a graveyard of sorts.

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