Ampersand
Ampersand is an annual publication created by the ECU School of Art & Design as a way to advertise the School’s master’s program. The book includes photos of each of the current graduate students, their biographies, artist statements, contact information and most importantly; images of their work. It is used by the school to advertise the graduate program and show those interested what kind of art is being created by the students. Every year senior graphic design students in the SOAD are each tasked with creating and typesetting their own versions of the publication while senior photography students photograph the headshots of the current graduate students to be used in the publication. I was one of the senior photography students that took the photos. I actually was able to photograph over 50% of the graduate students. At the end of the semester one version is selected to be published by the school. I had the honor of having my version selected and published.
Cover Creation: Lumens & Chemograms
For my version of Ampersand I wanted to use an alternative photographic process to create the cover. I started out by trying different methods such as lumens and chemograms which created these beautiful textures and colors. Below are some examples of these lumens and chemograms.
Cover Creation: Van Dykes
Not wanting to settle for the first choice I went on to explore using both Van Dyke and Cyanotype to create different possible covers. Below are two examples of Van Dykes I created when trying to design the cover. In both I used a process called Blue Van Dyke where you bleach a Van Dyke with cyanotype to give it the blue Cyanotype color in specific areas where the Cyanotype is applied, that is if you don't wash it off immediately. If you do wash the cyanotype off immediately it bleaches the brown of the Van Dyke away but does not keep the blue color, as seen in the second example.
Cover Creation: Cyanotypes
Although I typically love Van Dyke I just couldn't get the beautiful blue of cyanotype out of my mind so I quickly moved on to working solely with Cyanotypes. I knew I wanted to create a multiple exposure of many different ampersands from different eras of typography and different styles of typefaces such as serifs or san serifs. Once I settled on this concept I created negatives of different types of ampersands, both normal and inverted so that I could play around with how they created negative space. After working with both kinds I noticed that the Cyanotypes created with the negative ampersands looked much more visually interesting and had a lot of texture while not being extremely busy. The fourth image below is one of the first cover concepts I created when working with the negative ampersands. I then moved to trying out different times and overlapping techniques which created the fifth image. Then after experimenting a bit more I created the sixth image which became my final cover.
Interior Spreads
Below are examples of spreads from two different graduate students. Each grad submitted work to be included in the publication as well a bio, and artist statement. I wanted the book to be easily navigable so I put each of the grad student’s names in large text on the right hand side of their bio page so anyone looking through the book would be able to quickly flip through to find any specific person without having to consult the table of contents. You may notice that each name looks familiar, this is because they are all also cyanotypes. I did this because I wanted to keep the visual style of the cyanotypes going through the entirety of the publication. I also used some of the possible covers I created as dividers pages (as can be seen in the last spread) to give the viewer’s eyes a resting point as well as continue the design language of the Cyanotypes going throughout. We were allowed to use a maximum of 3 spreads per student to display their work in order to keep production costs for the book down. This meant that I would be unable to include all of the submitted work at a suitable size. So I set out to work with each student to ensure that the work they were the most proud of was included in the publication.
