Brief
For my Final Major Project, I was inspired by an article entitled, ‘Books in the age of the iPad’, by Craig Mod (http://craigmod.com/journal/ipad_and_books/) I posed myself the investigative question, ‘What is the relevance of books in the digital age?’
Concept
Mod believes that the content of books should inform what format it is best suited to in order to retain meaning and quality. He believes that “formless content,” e.g. novels and other purely textual content books, can adapt well to any electronic reading device without loosing it’s “meaning”.
But he believes that “definite content,” content that contains designed textual layouts, images, graphs, poetry etc, that have more considered design and structuring, could loose its meaning and quality when transferred over to general electronic reading devices. He feels that “definite content” should be divided between print, maintaining its meaning and quality, and also adapted for the iPad, which he believes is currently the best e-reader platform to transfer this type of book content onto.
With this principle in mind he believes that the books we do make and print should embrace their physicality “working in concert with the content to illuminate the narrative”. He states that they should “be confident in form and usage of material”, “exploit the advantages of print”, and “be built to last”.
Solution
Based on this, I decided to redesign a “formless content” book into a “definite content” book, to make it into something that had to be read as a printed piece in order to communicate deeper meaning and quality and increase it's significance and relevance as a printed piece. 2013 is the 200th anniversary of the novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen, one of my favourite novels. I decided to recreate it and produce a celebratory 200th anniversary version. While e-readers like Kindles display one page at a time, I used the physicality of the whole printed book as a means for communicating the dialogue of Pride and Prejudice in a way that displays emotion and meaning through the placing of text. As the novel contains several letters, I have made ‘letter pages’ so that the reader can pull out a physical letter from the book and read it as the character in the book would read it, exploiting the advantage of print.
The dialogue between Austen’s two main characters, our heroine Elizabeth Bennet and our hero Mr. Darcy, has been re-envisioned so that when they are speaking to each other alone, you have a sense of their feelings towards each other through the placement of their speeches on the page. The further away from the spine of the book their words are positioned, the less they like one another. The closer to the spine of the book their words are placed, the warmer their feelings are towards each other.
Dialogue between characters has been drawn from the narrative and is presented on it’s own pages. This conveys a stronger sense of conversation, helping to bring the characters to life. Each character has been colour coded so that on pages of dialogue, it is clear which characters are talking.
The novel contains several letters, so I made ‘letter pages’ for the reader to pull out physical letters to read, exploiting the advantages of the printed book.
