Tenochtitilan. Fifteenth Century AD.
My book is, essentially, a retailing of the history of the Aztec civilization and the conquest of the civilization by the Conquistadors. The book starts out with the civilization undisturbed, which quickly becomes more disturbed by the attack of the Spaniards, and then eventually downfalls and vanishes.
Type and the dots separately have a hard time communicating a point across to you, but through the conjoining of them, they become much stronger in the message they try to communicate. I focused my dots on colors used back in that time period in their architecture, art, and clothing.
In this book I worked with a few main ideas and objectives to keep constant throughout the book. The first one is the "unit shape" that either appears or is alluded to on every page. The second one is color, I kept my color pallet to blues, greens, and reds. The book starts out mainly blue and greens with very few reds, then transitions into more emphasis on the red with accents of blues and greens, and then eventually fades back out into nothing but blues and greens. Overall with these aspects and keeping the transparency pages to the same sort of feel and consistency, I feel I have been able to create a nicely cohesive piece.
The biggest thing that I have come to find in the course of this project is that imagery can either make your project that much stronger or just rip itself apart. Imagery must be supportive but not overpowering; cohesive, but not too boring and monochromatic. Also, relying too heavily on imagery is the moment I would realize that the concept I was working on at that time was a bad one, and so I would fresh or take that idea in a new direction.
I feel that I have a rather high craft. But craft is always something that I can continue and keep working on and striving for a higher level of. Thinking abstractly is something that I struggled with the entire project long. I am not an abstract thinker in general, so this project has really got my brain working and thinking in new and different ways.
