The Challenge
A brief of creating a spread for an Experimental Publication was assigned. The short story, House Taken Over, by Julio Cortázar was chosen and researched in order to create a spread that reflected upon certain themes of the story.
The Process
House Taken Over is a story that has themes of fear, isolation, avoidance, and loss. Several recurring motifs include yarn (and unravelling), books (and subsequent endings), time (running out), and a mysterious entity or darkness that needed to be avoided—never questioned.
Drafts
Inspiration was taken from the inner and outer workings of an old house. Concepts such as long, seemingly never-ending hallways were explored (but later scrapped—there was, in fact, an end, one that the narrators feared was approaching too soon. Motifs of unravelling yarn were combined with the concept of a floor plan: the unravelling represents the main characters’ states of mind. The imagery of dark rooms with a small amount of light represented how the main characters (and their house) were engulfed by the entity that they feared.
The Results
The final product tells the story of House Taken Over with type. Over the course of the story, the body copy transitions between 3 typefaces (Playfair, Optima, and Avenir). This transition from delicate serif to sans represents what the main characters lose within the story.
Different pieces of dialogue are fragmented and shift between a serif and a sans face, foreshadowing the pieces of personality lost throughout the course of the story. The type becomes nonsensical at times, symbolizing the brash and sudden decision the main characters make to accept that their home is being taken over. They do not question it, they do not fight it; they simply lock off parts of their home and, subsequently, parts of themselves as well.
The “splitting” of the title as well as the stark cut between the body copy overlaying the image on the second page, alludes to the splitting of the house, and the line that moves across the first page represents both the unravelling of yarn as well as the floor plan of the house.
The quote, “They’ve taken over the back part,” is split so that the shadow of a sans typeface can be seen behind a serif face. The typographic layout of this quote represents the dark entity surrounding the main characters and how quietly it takes over their lives.
The quote, “You can live without thinking,” at the end of the line symbolizes the frayed end of a string of yarn. This quote is one of the tipping points for the house being completely taken over (represented by the serif to sans transition).
The title is repeated at the end of the story; however, this time, it is split between Playfair and Avenir to finally mark the house being taken over and changed.
The callout resides in the window of the image, separate from the rest of the story, so as not to pull the reader away until the very end. The type moves along certain sections of the window with gaps left in between to exemplify the literary method being defined: pace.
The short story was featured in a publication of student works for the experimental typography book Morphology: Anthology of Dialogue.
Project Information
Project Type
School Project
School
MacEwan University
Date
November 2019
My Role
Mood boarding
Image editing
Typesetting
Design Tools
Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop