Frankenstein
2019 | Editorial Design including all photographs, collages, and paintings by Bridgette Silva
Book Redesign
The redesign of this book created an opportunity to showcase the story of San Francisco and the untold narrative of overlooked lost souls.
Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus Front Cover Book Redesign
Overview
In today’s day and age, we are often isolated within our busy worlds forgetting to take in our surroundings, always overlooking the people that make up these surroundings.
The recurring theme within the book showcases collaged chapter and letter pages, mixing photos of San Francisco’s wealthy and poverty-filled areas to create the sense of separation between both worlds.
Chapter Pages
Within every chapter page there is a collage including the homeless that roam San Francisco, usually left forgotten and overlooked.
The theme engages readers while captivating the story of San Francisco, bringing attention to the quick shift of clean streets to the ugly truth that is homelessness, poverty, and the hardships of San Francisco.
Composition Development
Major findings were discovered during the first round of collages:
Adding texture with acrylic paint
Paint splatters increase from light to dark through a series of greyscale backgrounds.
Paint splatters symbolize the transition of Victor Frankenstein’s character development from childhood to adulthood.
Adding a 1/2” border to every canvas was incorporated into the rest of the collages.
From analog to digital, collages were Photoshop to include more grain to represent the “grunge and distressed” look of the streets of San Francisco.
Letter Pages
The final iteration for the letter pages included complimentary elements from the chapter page compositions. To reduce waste and to add texture to the composition, left over scraps of paper from unused photos were used.
A clean blend of chaos and order was represented through hand ripped pieces of paper that symbolize distress along with precisely cut pieces of scraps symolizing the order.
During the first round of iterations, the titles on letter pages were added digitally over a black background text block. The text was not in unison with the rest of the design due to its structured look.
After printing and reviewing several font sizes, I landed on hand cut 72pt black text over a lighter shade of scrap ripped paper to add contrast to the composition.
Paint Splatter
A series of paint splatters that increased from “white to black” became the base of every collage.
24x20 bristol boards were cut down to 7x10” boards to accommodate for the added 1/2” boarder for a final 6x9” canvas.
Some of the paint splatters lost value when going through the final digital editing process.
Nonetheless, the idea of using paint splatters to represent character development was still prominent in the final theme.
Fillers
At the end of every chapter, I discovered that the white space created a blunt stop that took away from the fluid visual of the book, the blunt stop was much like a widow at the end of a paragraph.
I created new paint splatters on tracing paper to scan in and add to the end of the chapter pages.
Editorial Design
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