Design Process - Design Development

from the initial ideas stage of the project, peer critique sessions allowed for refinements to be made in terms of approach to the object. As the chosen idea was to create a booklet based on the style of graphic novels such as Sin City, it meant annalysing A Clockwork Orange and deciding how the film adaptation could be altered to look like this.

Therefore, I started by looking at the style and layout that is used by Frank Miller in his work to find inspiration for the project. Analysing the imagery used in his work shows that much of the content is heavily based around black and white illustrations, which correspond with the background colours. In this way the imagery is simple, but unique as it does not involve using more than a handfull of flat colours.

In the same way, the aim of the outcome for the project was to create images from A Clockwork Orange that minimalised the use of many colours and instead highlighted certain aspects of the scenes. For example, where there was a scene involving a woman in a red outfit, it seemed necessary to experiment with this technique by creating the surrounding environment in shades of black and white, while the red outfit would stay the same. In this way it gave each of the images a way of focusing the attention of the audience to a certain aspect of the scene.

As the colour was mainly used to highlight the main subjects of each scene, it began to work well in a sequence. 

In terms of the layout for the designs, it was necessary to use the same reocurring boxes for each scene as it created a flowing pattern that can be found in a similar way in comic books. To add to this, the text boxes of each scene also reflected on the dialogue from the film and they too would follow the same layout with shadowed outlines, making the boxes three dimentional. 

For the fonts used throughout the booklet, it was necessary to look first at the typography used throughout the film. After looking for several font that were used throughout the film, I found there were two stand out fonts that would be recognisable and relatable with the themes of the film. These fonts were Synthemesc, which was used in the Korova Milkbar scenes and the Timepiece font, which was used for the title of the film. For the dialogue text, I looked for a comic book style font as many of Frank Miller’s graphic novels tend to feature these throughout. 

After looking through many different comic book fonts, Cotidiana seemed like the most appropriate for the booklet, as it was a satirical, sans serif typeface. This was chosen because the themes of the booklet were dark, yet satirical in nature and therefore went well with this typeface.