Side One

A visualization of music.

Side One is a visual book comprised of two-page spreads detailing not only general information about various musical albums, but also seeking to express the musical gestalt of those albums through the art and hierarchy of each spread.

Early motivation for the project came form the types of large, cross-page spreads and photos used in hobby magazines and National Geographic -- all very graphic-centric publications with de-emphasized text and a complicated grid.

These initial stylistic inspirations, combined with an interest in representing other passions of mine within a visual medium, led to the decision to "feature" a series of musical albums in a visual book, with each album receiving a dedicated two-page spread of both visual and textual content. A rough template for this idea can be observed in a general layout template, which served as a guide for most of the spreads featured in the final book. Although this template was generally effective, some of its issues included the lack of a persistent location for name and genre information about the album, which made the book difficult to follow. This is evident in some early spreads.

Following some revision to make each spread more cohesive across the greater context of a single book, the final spreads took on the appearance you can see below, with each page having some space dedicated to the display of general information about each album. Displaying a sufficiently clear information hierarchy, while still allowing the art to sit front and center in the viewer's attention, took a bit of finesse but was a great design exercise.

Each spread made use of a modified version of its album's original cover art; a significant design challenge was figuring out how to expand -- both literally and artistically -- these existing square artworks to a two-page space. This was a exercise in iteration and hierarchy, and definitely manifested itself in different ways across different spreads.

Following completion of the design process, the final product was printed and bound into a real book!