Assignment 1, The Information
Design a new cover for The Information, by James Gleick, using only the photocopier and one copy of the book.
This is a design project. The goal is to think about what material from *inside* the book should go on the *outside* of the book. What is the most salient and resonant information?
Week 1: Starting with a physical copy of the book, have a look through it. Then pick some sections of your choosing and read some of it. You will not need to read the entire book in this case, but enough to understand what it is like and enough to mine some relevant, umm, information.
Week 2: Prepare a full-size printed mockup of your book cover design. Print it out in color and assemble the jacket at full size. Wrap it around your copy of the book and be prepared to speak about it.
Weeks 3: Based on feedback from week 2, prepare a final cover. Again, print it and wrap your book with it. We will have a final crit in class.
You should work directly and intimately with the physical material at hand. In this case, that is your copy of the book. What does it look like? What does it say? Are there traces of its previous circulation? You may use the photocopier to sample anything from the book. You may enlarge, reduce, crop, rotate, invert, blur, or really anything you can achieve on the copier but you may not use additional material outside of the book. This may at first feel like a constraint, but design loves constraints. By the end, maybe you will also.