Typographic Book Assignment
Typography Course Exercise — Parsons School of Design, The New School
Fall 2024The assignment was to pick any concept and develop a book around it from start to finish.
When this assignment was given, I identified my initial concept pretty quickly. I had about a year’s worth of screenshots of Spotify daylists lying around in my camera roll that I was saving for, well, I didn’t really know. I had collected them over the course of the first year of the feature’s release for various reasons — sometimes to marvel at their accurateness, their silliness, their insane specificity or their plain absurdness. I had more than enough material in these screenshots spanning the course of about a year to create a book around.
The Concept Development:
While I had a solid initial idea, the real challenge began when figuring out a visual language to represent the playlists that went beyond simply putting nearly identical screenshots of playlists on back to back pages. It was also challenging to decide how to frame the narrative of the book to be more than just “here are some playlists Spotify has generated for me over the past year.”
Ultimately, after trying several different visual motifs to represent the playlists, I went with a classic music reference, using the center label of a record as the imagery to represent each playlist. The narrative of the book ended up being a commentary on the daylist feature itself, evaluating its evolution over its first year, taking stock at each new season of how well I felt the daylist feature “got to know me.”
The Moodboard:
I was also eager to play around with different page sizes in this book, so I incorporated a few “mini books” into the design. Each season contains a reflection section, called the season’s “Wrapped” (à la Spotify Wrapped), where the pages are half the width of the rest of the pages in the book, letting these sections stand out among the rest of the pages.
This was my first experience with bookmaking as a whole, including the binding process. Given the opportunity to reprint this book, I would opt for a different binding treatment so the spreads can be viewed as intended, as full layouts spanning two pages, and to give accents like the page numbers more visibility.
Project Duration: ~4 weeks
Tools: Adobe Indesign, Illustrator, Photoshop
Solo Project
Course Instructor: Tamara Maletic