A catalog for a musical legend in a style from a graphic design movement from the mid-19th century through the 1970s. The musical group or musician and design movement chosen must have a logical connection as to why they are paired. I chose to make a catalog for N.W.A in the style of Deconstructivism.
N.W.A
INSTRUCTORROD WHITNEY
INSTITUTION
TYLER SCHOOL OF ART AND architecture
Deconstructivism in graphic design breaks the rules of traditional design rules. Where the page layout is decided by the creator, where typography can be illustrative and highlights the relationship between text and pictures.
I felt that N.W.A was the best musical group to represent this movement. The music group is known as the world's most dangerous crew, creating what is now known as “Gangster rap”, and is a crew who broke the rules. Their songs were loud, and the lyrics were real; politicians tried to stop them from producing the “vulgar” music they made, but they only got more famous, and the rest is history.
The colors of the music catalog are red, white and black to match the look and feel of most of the group's album covers. I use spray paint repeatedly throughout the catalog to represent the 90s hip hop era and type treatment to fit the Deconstructivism style.
The challenge with designing in the style of Deconstructivism, is becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable. Usually, within the design, every decision you make is made with the intent to be user-friendly. Words are easy to read, and everything is spaced out well and properly aligned. But in this style, you must break those rules. There is no uniform typeface; sentences, are hard to read but manageable to piece together. Pictures and text are cut off, upside down, sideways, overlapping, backward, big, and small. There are no rules.
After researching Deconstructivism, I found that David Carson’s magazine “Ray Gun” was an excellent reference for me. In almost all of the magazines, the letters feel like they were poorly screen printed, which is known as a “distressed texture” but used anyways. I did this to all of the big letters used to spell out each rapper's name. I also took the most quotable lyrics from each rapper and spray-painted it through the spread in an unconventional way that is still readable.
Pictures and text are constantly overlapping each other, making the picture obscured in some way, the text hard to read, or not readable at all. I repeatedly wrote the callout of the article throughout the spread. The callouts were typed out with different typefaces, font sizes, colors, and opacity.
