Rythmn & Pacing

Materials
Book Assignment
X-acto knife, glue, ruler, scissors, Xerox machine, text from Wikipedia,
2.5” x 2.5” squares from a magazine. This book is black & white only.

directions

1. Cut a 2.5” x 2.5” square clean through a magazine. This will yield doz-
ens of unexpected compositions for your book.

2. Choose ten of the squares that seem interesting to you. These will be
used as the imagery for your book.

3. Blow up the chosen ten squares by 200%, making the images 5”x5”. You
Work Schedule
can use a scanner or a photocopier to do this.
March 2nd:
4. Use the provided text as your copy. Remember that the way you handle Accordion Book mock-ups
type is just as important as the way you handle imagery. Use the text as due. Size and construction
must be exact.
body copy (small) and use it as a design element (big).
March 9th:
5. Your final book will consist of 6 spreads, each spread measuring 5”x10” Images blown up and
at its final size. That means that each spreads consists of two pages which ready to go. Three life
are 5”x5” each. You will have 12 pages total. size sketches for you book
due. We will be working in
class, so bring any and all
6. To create the structure of your book: supplies you will need. I
Because this is a long book (final size 5”x60”) we are going to have to will be talking with every-
“collage” the pages together. This means that you will need to add a 1/2” one individually about your
to your spreads so you will have room to attach the spreads to each other. book.
Whether you are laying your book out by hand or on the computer, you
working spread size will be 5”x10.5”, leaving the 1/2” on the right side March 16th:
Final book due and final
of each spread blank. This is where you will put the glue and attach the class! One copy for me and
spread to the following one. See attached diagram. one copy for you.

7. Create a visual “story” with the copy given and your found imagery.
Also think about using rules, blocks of color (black, white or grey only)
and overlapping in your compositions. Remember that variation and
changes in scale add an element of surprise as your viewer turns the
page which creates nice rhythm and pacing. er
wint
8. If you choose to design your book by hand, please photocopy the final
spreads and use those for your final piece so the book lies nice and flat.
2010
9. You will turn in two copies of your book, one for me an for your portfo-
lio. Please put your name on the back with pencil
 Rhythm & Pacing assignment

Designers often work with content distributed

across many pages. As in a single-page composition,
a sequential design must possess an overall coher-
ence. Imagery, typography, rules, color fields, and
so on are placed with mindful intention to create
focal points and to carry the viewer’s eye through
the piece. The repetition of elements such as circles,
lines, and texture creates visual rhythm, while vary-
ing size and intensity generates surprise. An under-
lying grid helps to bring order to a progression of
pages. Keeping an element of surprise and variation
Terms & Definitions
is key to sustaining interest from spread to spread.
spread
Interior two pages of a book with the spine
In this assignment, you with be creating a “visual in the middle
story” by considering the pacing and scale of the
accordion book
images and text within each spread and across the Having folds or bends like the bellows of an
entire sequence. Working with found or accidental accordion

content frees designers to think abstractly and em- rhythm

brace experimentation. A patterned repetition of a motif, formal ele-
ment, etc., at regular or irregular intervals in
the same or a modified form.
The success of this assignment depends on two
things; experimentation and making wise use of rules
Lines used in graphic design to create move-
your time line. Begin by defining your content (im- ment, direction, interest or to give an object
ages and text) then start to experiment with the lay- more weight or significance.

out of your spreads. Will you use a grid? If so, define pace
it, stick to it, and figure out where to break it. If not, A rate of activity, progress, growth, perfor-
mance, etc.
start laying down elements and see what works. How
can you draw attention to certain images or words? typography
Typography is writing with prefabricated
Can the text become a texture? Overlap! How can
letters
you use rules and color fields to add interest? Play,
play, play play and play some more. grid
A two-dimensional structure made up of a
series of intersecting vertical and horizontal
Use your time line. Do not wait to the last minute to axes used to structure content.

begin your project because it will not be successful. variation

you have three weeks, do something brilliant! Creating different instances, forms and
shapes from a theme or element.
 My New york (Book Text)

The wealth of the world has a New York address. It piles think of putting her in a nursing home).
up in buildings on land that is laced with gold. And per- Now these buildings are filled with the young and the
haps nowhere is the essence of New York more evident successful who can pay rents of $3,000 a month. “The
than in Greenwich Village—for it is a microcosm of all woman across the street was 74 and paying $50 a
that New York has become, and in its story is the story of month in rent,” says a woman called Big Millie, who lives
a great city. The village that became famous to America in the area and has to climb 66 steps to her apartment
was formed by migrations from Italy, the west of Ireland, at 225 Sullivan Street. “She dies. I come back from the
and by Americans calling themselves Bohemians—for funeral and a single woman is moving in. She ends up
into the narrow, crooked streets of Greenwich Village paying $1,500 for the same matchbox. A few more of
came legions of artists, philosophers, poets, writers, at- these people and we won’t have nothin’ left in the neigh-
tempted artists and writers, and their followers. borhood.”

It is one of the few places in the city where the sky has It is these rents that affected the Genovese crime family,
not been stolen by high and indescribably ugly build- once the nation’s biggest and most lethal Mafia outfit.
ings. You can stand on a Greenwich Village street in the For it was in the Village, famed for palette and pen, that
early Manhattan morning and watch the night sky lighten the mob missed its first heartbeat. The organization
and break into streaks of rose that suddenly saturate the flourishes in places where the poor live. In a sense, real
heavens, then burst with sunlight that ignites sidewalk estate prices more than the law did in the Mafia—and
and street. helped change the character of this part of New York.

The sun glistens on Washington Square Park’s white Consider the story of mobster Benny Eggs. He was
marble arch. Eighty-six feet (26 meters) high and 30 feet paying $200 a month for his ground-floor clubhouse at
(9 meters) wide, it was built in 1895 for $128,000—then 101 Thompson Street. He assumed the landlord was
enough to buy Ukraine. The park’s glory is tarnished by satisfied. The landlord was satisfied—satisfied that one
the fact that its pin oaks, oriental planes, yellow locusts, day the cops would catch up with Benny Eggs and the
ashes, and American elms once were used as gallows clubhouse would be ready to rent to some scarecrow
trees from which men swung for such crimes as burglary, woman designer from Milan for thousands. Each morn-
pickpocketing, and having the wrong skin color. ing, the landlord thrilled at the headlines in the New York
Daily News about Mafia arrests—delight that turned to
History is alive on every corner and in every alley. despair when Benny Eggs was not among them.
At Number 61 Washington Square South, Madame
Blanchard’s Rooming House was home to Theodore Then came the headline he had been dreaming of:
Dreiser, Adelina Patti, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Willa BENNY EGGS BUSTED. Soon there was a store on the
Cather, John Dos Passos, James Oppenheim, Pierre ground floor of Number 101 that paid $3,500 and sold
Matisse, René duBois, and Alan Steeger. expensive Italian fashions.

Eugene O’Neill and Edna St. Vincent Millay worked at The city is advertised as changing, but in some ways it
133 MacDougal Street. John Masefield scrubbed floors really has not. One of its greatest addresses—Green-
in Luke O’Connor’s bar on Greenwich Avenue. Humorist wich Village—is driven by the same fierce energy that
O. Henry supposedly gained inspiration for his story “The coursed through those tenement hallways of old. There
Last Leaf” from the gate at 59 Grove Street. And Edgar are all those people crowded together, brushing against
Allan Poe, a reporter for the Broadway Journal, probably each other, causing the blood to run so fast. Those
wrote some of “The Raven” in the Village. people are the most powerful people on Earth—in its
most powerful city.
Most Village residents back then crowded into tenement
buildings. They lived with a furious energy—amid clamor- JIMMY BRESLIN, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaperman, has
ing noise and children in doorways. Invariably, in a tiny covered New York City for more than 40 years.
room, a sick old aunt languished in bed (it was hideous to
page page glue
5”x5” 5”x5” 1/2”

spread
5”x10”

total spread
length
10.5”