‘Tales of Tricky Travels’ is a publication designed to narrate my difficult journey to New Zealand in 2013. The narrative describes the physical and psychological risks of the trip. I knew that the journey was a risk, but was unaware of how badly I would suffer.

The brief was to produce a book based upon a 1000 word narrative relating to one of four themes: Guilt, Risk, Loss, Luck. The book needed to be formally typeset in a compelling design that expressed the story. Whilst the book is clearly ‘personal’ in nature, it had to be created as if for mass-production and consumption, so the text needed to be dealt with typographically, and formally ‘typeset’ in an appropriate way for the story. Not only was this an editorial and typographic project, it also gave me the chance to focus on different methods of book-binding and publication design, and to expand my creative skill-set.

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An added requirement of the brief was that the design response had to be exclusively typographic. This meant that the use of images was prohibited and any visuals had to be ‘constructed’ through careful composition of the type or the use of individual glyphs. This challenged us to explore different ways in which we could set type to visually illustrate the narrative whilst ensuring that it remained clearly legible.

This led to the development of a series of typographic ‘pieces’ compiled together to tell the story in both written and visual forms. Each page featured a different typeset style that best illustrated the narrative of that page’s text.

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This publication only documented the journey to New Zealand, but not the story of my time there. This leaves the opportunity open to design another publication that documents my visit, or one that tells the story of another journey. I could develop a series of publications that document my travels around the world, each having an underlying visual format but each different in the way the text is typeset.

Not only was this brief set as a significant challenge to my design skills, it has helped me to develop my ability to think about possible future adaptations and extensions to a brief; developing my forward thinking around a project and where it could go.

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The full publication can be viewed here.