The Quiet at the End of the World
Set in the far future where the continuation of the human race is in peril, two teenagers discover what it means to be human. The author includes narratives from varied sources, for example: social media, websites, news reports and log books; and expects me as the typesetter to interpret the text and to design styles to match the meaning of her text.
This is the opening page of the main text of the book and is a transcription of a phone call to the emergency services. I imagined this to be similar to a court transcript, with the speaker on the left and their speech tabbed to the right, forming a clear line for the readers’ eyes to be drawn back to.
The text is ranged left, but is not justified and does not use hyphenation because examples I found of court transcripts also did not, and I think it reflects the messy nature of the conversation.
The inspiration for the log book styling at the opening of each chapter came from the author, an image of her suggestion is on the inspiration page below.
I took the clean double lines for the table, the typed headers and handwritten entries. The handwriting typeface had to be legible and slightly careless in a teenage manner.
The tables were a challenge because I had to fit some very long entries into the space and ensure that there was uniform space between the table and body text. The tables extend out past the right and left of the text block to create more space for the entries, and I am really pleased with how the styling turned out.
I took the opportunity to display the “Rules of Lowrie’s Growlery” in a faux plaque to break up the page and to draw attention to the difference between eight-year-old Lowrie’s rules and the grandeur of them being on a gold plaque.
Lowrie and Shen miss out on the rush of social media as we know it, but they do use an instant-messaging client. I kept the style fairly simple with a typeface that could support Chinese characters. The responses from Shen are in a lighter tint of black to define the difference between the speakers.
The poster for the life-saving robot was my favourite part of the book to design – a chance to design a Transport for London poster. I went to the archives of TfL and took photos of posters around London to get a feel of the designs already in circulation. Their branding is strong, and yet the designs play around a lot with the design of the roundel in each poster.
I had a strong idea that I wanted a life-saving ring sectioned with waved across it.
I wish that I could have created the poster in bright, branded colours.
An important interaction on Twitter is the re-tweet, and this page shows my design for this situation. My version of InDesign at the time didn’t support borders around paragraphs and neither did I want to anchor a frame behind it. Instead, I chose to shade the paragraph in a tint of grey.
The paragraph is also slightly indented: more so than the original post, but not as much as the following comment.
An example of a shared link in Twitter with a title in all caps and a lead in paragraph in a bolder font to draw attention to the main part of the story.
I designed this news article in a different way to previous articles for a number of reasons: It is not part of social media or the future narrative. It is a crucial turning point of the story and I needed to highlight it to the readers.
I used an Internet browser frame with a tab open to an invented news website to really drive home the importance of the text.