Rationale for Design *

Frances Motta, Graphic Designer

I start design projects with the ultimate goal of revealing the larger themes and ideas within the content I’m designing. In my mind, the work of a designer is to distill ideas to their most potent form and to find ways of expressing those ideas using the tools of graphic design.

This project had many promising ideas to explore. The Teaching and Learning Online Network (TALON) is an online project, and since the goal was to produce a hard copy book, the design challenge was to transform virtual content into a physical form. The content of the project, however, had the opposite intent: how to handle the transition from an in-person to an online learning format. This theme of “pulling in two opposing directions” was what intrigued me, and what I wanted to explore from the outset.

The most eloquent tool in the book designer’s arsenal is typography. Typefaces lend a formal voice to the content, and in a book the selection of this voice is one of the most important design decisions to make. I only considered contemporary typefaces released in the past few years for this project because I wanted to capture the voice of this period of societal shift. I defined “contemporary typefaces” as those designed with no intent to faithfully recreate a singular historic style, which is a common trait within type design.

This book is set in GT Alpina, a typeface from the vast serif family designed by Swiss designer Reto Moser and released in 2020 by Grilli Type. We—the TALON team and I—came to this decision after exploring several other options, each with their own narrative context. At first, we experimented with geometric sans serif typefaces, which are the quintessential choices for digital brands and with Signifier, a typeface that formalizes a digital immateriality by drawing on a deeply material past. In the end we settled on GT Alpina, in which the forms of the letters reach into the grab-bag of typographical histories to create an expressive but pragmatic voice untethered from a certain style. Its letters are rooted in classic book typography that require steady rhythm and careful proportions. However, GT Alpina subverts the idea of being a “workhorse” typeface by fully embracing expressive and unexpected forms. In selecting this typeface, I considered its outspoken personality—the letters lend personality to the perspectives of the interviewees, which is a great match for a book of multi-disciplinary interviews.

The largest single influence on the design of this book was the commissioned photography, which was created prior to the layout of the book. The tangible quality and notable lack of digital signifiers within these images largely inspired the direction we took, which was to avoid typographic or graphic plays that reference digital interfaces.

In these photographs, the skewed nature of the interview screenshots was an intriguing effect that I wanted to highlight. The transition of the interviewees’ likeness from a three-dimensional person to a two-dimensional screenshot to a three-dimensional presence in a frame, and back to a two-dimensional image in this book is a process that typifies the experimental and iterative nature of the transition from in-person to online learning at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The shape of a skewed screen is used throughout the book to represent a window into the interviewees’ perspectives. We imagined the cover as the all too familiar grid of a Zoom call, with all twenty-five interviews represented.

In my mind, these skewed screens point to the constant process of transitioning our experience from the physical to the digital and back again. Undoubtedly, these transitions will be ever-present as we shift to a new norm of teaching and learning.

About

Frances Motta is a graphic designer and creative director. She graduated from Alberta University of the Arts in 2015, and has worked and studied in Calgary, Toronto, Philadelphia, and Vancouver. She splits her focus between print, infographics, publication work, and brand identities. She is particularly interested in collaborating on projects with designers in other fields, and is currently involved in ongoing publication designs for Sustainable Calgary, brand identities for design practices Man & Son and MTHARU, and infographics for The Atlas of Furniture Design by the Vitra Design Museum.