My fifth experiment was to extract the various components of the English Crime and Execution Broadside and look at their framing. In addition, I collected some of the horrific crime news of the twentieth century and the horrific murder news that is happening in the UK these days as a way to categorise, contrast and explore how crime news is presented in the past and in modern times, and to identify the differences and commonalities.
Based on the previous analysis and experiments, I started to delve further into Broadsides, trying to change the relationships and create some new patterns.
What’s working well?
- I made an effort to keep my attention on the material in the collection. I have tried a handful of different approaches to working with the material in my collection: looking for its shared structures/layouts/visual elements, experimenting with the information by changing the layout, and looking at it on context of later crime publishing.
- I have researched newspaper from the current modern era and used my findings to simplify and provide the information contained in the broadsides.
- I have played with different degrees of contrast between components of the head of the broadsides. Different parts of the title being scaled up/down delivered a different kind of message. The variety of experiments I have done shows that I am at a deeper level of cataloguing. And the change in title shows a bright spot in my method.
- The redesign of the newspaper article pages has created a new visual impression in my project. The importance of the positioning and size of text and images has been recognised and can serve as a basis for future design.
- The way I have experimented with the layout, size of the text and images gives out a new context and changes how people understand the collection.
What’s not working?
- Some of the interesting work from last week, like the pairing of the illustrations with the accompanying verses from the same broadsides, has not been carried out further.
- I seem to have stopped my open-ended experimentation and ended up trying to ‘solve’ something about the material (like trying to improve its readability).
- I am actually presenting the broadside of the past in a modern newspaper publishing style, but have not researched the newspaper enough, resulting in a visual effect that is not yet prominent and should be continued in depth.
- My project is stuck in the digital version and has not resulted in a printed version.
To develop this further…
- I can explore some interesting qualities of materials …… For example, working with woodblock illustrations or letterpress… what would it mean to try to understand these broadsides through their original tools of production.
- Adding experimentation with illustration – zooming, different perspectives,… in combination with the current state.
- I should collect some recent newspapers, touch, analyse and research the information in them in order to experiment with how to classify and redesign broadsides.
- I should print out my final outcome so that they resemble the real newspaper.
- I can try more different treatment to the same piece broadsides. For example, try changing other elements of the broadsides.