Annals of the Entomological Society
Class: Editorial Design Studio 3
Timeline: 5 weeks
Role: Editorial Designer & Illustrator
Tools: Photoshop, Procreate, InDesign
For our final project, we were given the freedom to choose any single or series of long texts to curate and design into a book and one additional format of our choice. I chose three articles from the Annals of the Entomological Society of America, Volume 17, Issue 4, originally written and published in the 1920s. I was able to recontextualize the articles in a more contemporary way, as well as frame the subject of insects in a friendlier, more approachable manner.
The Annals of the Entomological Society of America was a bimonthly journal that published reports on the basic aspects of the biology of arthropods ranging from topics such as physiology to behavior and included a variation of photography, graphs, and charts. The three articles I chose were on the flannel moth (Lago crispata), the bumblebee (Bombus spp.), and the Japanese crane fly (Tipula spp.). The articles I chose were originally written in the 1920s and were very detailed and specific on a specific topic as pertaining to the chosen insect. With that in mind, I created guiding questions that would help me design the book.
How might the text be recontextualized in a modern, friendlier way?
How can aspects of its time period still be incorporated?
How can we frame the subject of insect physiology and behavior as more approachable?
GUIDING QUESTIONS
In the final design, I ended up designing two versions of the book, printing one myself and having the other professionally printed. These two versions accomplished my goal of recontextualizing the text in a more approachable way in different directions. I illustrated the images of insects myself to lend a more artistic rather than frightening quality to them and chose a friendlier and versatile sans-serif font. I was generous with the use of white space in order to give the reader time to digest both the text and the images. To incorporate the aspects of its time period, I chose a beige-toned paper for printing, kept the images in greyscale, and bound it with a kettle-stitch, adding a layer of wax paper to the cover to formulate it like a field journal the researchers might use for observation.
FINAL BOOK DESIGN
In the professionally printed version of the book, I replaced my artistic illustrations with the placeholder, 10-second sketches I had drawn for previous iterations, giving the tone of this version a much sillier quality. Its professional quality with a white cover and pages also helped lend a more modern approach to this version.
