Order & Eccentricity
BA Major Design
BA Visual Communication Project
Summer semester
If you stumble upon Markus Kutter’s book Schiff nach Europa you can clearly spot the eccentricity of its layout. The body text is set large and small, the text lines change direction and assume different positions across every page. The book design is by Karl Gerstner. This peculiar design could be interpreted in two different ways: from one side the layout is controlled (as the book states, the text is “visually organized”, so it is set to visualize the contents) but the same layout is also truly experimental and completely out of the ordinary. This dualism is at the core of the design concept of this publication.
Talking about our practice, when it comes to doing something new it’s always hard to set our work between order and eccentricity… from one side we want to express something new and original, but at the same time we want to stick with conventions and shared communication channels. An ordered structure gives us something to hold on. But order sometimes is also a cage of boredom, so we try to offset things around. Order and Eccentricity: they are both essential and they can coexist, despite being at odds with each other.
What does it mean to navigate and choose between these two proprieties? Could we live with pure order or by total nonconformity? What happened if we go too far away from standards? And is it possible to achieve too much order?
Every student will be asked to explore, interpret, and elaborate both the concepts of Order and Eccentricity through photography, typography, and book/editorial design.
