Gallery visit: Museu del Disseny de Barcelona

A recent trip to Barcelona allowed me to visit 'Museu del Disseny de Barcelona' which had level 4 dedicated to the Graphic Design collection, showing the development in design styles from 1940-1980.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

This idea (fig. 1 and top right fig.2) goes against the idea that a front covers typography should be left to right diagonal, so that the diagonal scan can be successfully performed by the reader. The artists choice to have the writing in the top right is interesting because it shows a strong sends of confidence that the image will be the main focus in providing the audience with an idea of what the magazine may contain and the style in which this will be delivered. When designing the book cover, I will need to consider which elements are the most important and this will then impact the way in which the front cover is composed.  

The design style of figure 3 is interesting because it was clearly very heavily impacted by the topic of the book. Sigmund Freud did a lot of research into psychoanalysis and the two tone dots symbolise the conscious vs. the subconscious. It is interesting how the artist chose for the typography to not stand out instantly, reflecting the fact that the thought process of people needs to be looked into and isn't always instantly obvious to the psychologist. It will be important for me to approach the book cover design in this way, looking for concepts within the text that could be represented by the design style that I chose to follow.

Fig. 4

The use of a consistent design style is setting I would consider to be important when designing a collection or series of books. Figure 4 shows how effective this can be, using the colour yellow throughout the whole series, having the black section across the bottom and the using the same typeface on each of the books. It allows for the target audience to become familiar with one or two of the titles and then from then on they would have the ability to predict what kind of content they will receive if buying any of the ones that they are not familiar with. The idea of using a consistent layout and design style is similar to the work of Romeck Marber, a designer who applied the marber grid to each of the crime penguin books to create a in house recognisable design style.