Shrike

When I started thinking about this project, I didn’t know what word I wanted to work with. In undergrad, I was a journalism major, and I’ve always loved to read so it was a little overwhelming to choose just one to focus on. I decided the easiest way for me to pick a word I liked for this assignment would be to browse my favorite artists and pick one of their songs as inspiration. I decided to go with the song “Shrike” by Hozier.

Hozier’s music has always felt perfect to me. His lyrics are poetry that can be analyzed in any beginner’s English course because there are so many different meanings for each of his songs. Instead of basing my design on the interpretation of the song, I decided to add some vines and simple text because vines, wildflowers and nature were always something I associated with Hozier. While the vines didn’t turn out exactly how I wanted them, I had fun making them and it was certainly challenging at times when I was trying to navigate the pen tool.

The power of typography is something I really learned about in this module. Simply tracking headlines and spacing out uppercase letters versus lowercase letters in a sequence was something I was considering when making my piece. Ellen Upton writes on her website, “Adjusting the overall spacing of a group of letters is called tracking or letterspacing. By expanding the tracking across a word, line, or entire block of text, the designer can create a more airy, open field.” As I was picking my font for this assignment, I was also playing around with spacing, uppercase versus lowercase letters and how much space I would need in between each letter to make the vines. Initially, when I would look at text either in a design piece or even in a textbook, I wouldn’t even consider the spacing between the letters or what would look more aesthetically pleasing when people were looking at a piece with text.

Another thing I really struggled with was not filling all my whitespace on this project. Kim Golombisky and Rebecca Hagen write in their “Beginner’s Guide to Communicating Visually Through Graphic, Web and Multimedia Design,” “After centering, the other beginner’s temptation is to fill up all four corners of the layout, along with every other available bit of space. This results in a cluttered, thus unappealing and confusing, visual message. White space is not your enemy.” I wanted to take up the entire space and make more vines and flowers and go absolutely crazy, but I remembered I wanted this to be simple and emphasize a feeling. Ultimately, this project was really fun because I felt like I was able to create something that expressed how I felt and what I thought and use a song from one of my favorite artists to do it.