Ben Jackson

After speaking with David he agreed that the idea of the black hole showing falling and fear, as well as using the style of illusions and expressive typography to do this. He advised me to continue looking into my ideas and carry out some research into similar styles, looking at the feelings they bring about and how they do this through their style and colours.

First off I carried out some research to gain some influence on how to design my images. All the images I chose below are the style of work I am looking for and all portray similar feelings. Each of the images I found gave some sense of falling, whether it’s falling from the top of the page to the bottom, or falling and fading into the centre of the page. Not only does it give a sense of falling but also the thoughts and feelings one my have when falling from thousands of feet in the air. They all have a feeling of movement which is brought about by either just changing the scale or in some cases changing the opacity to give the feeling of fading away. The majority of the examples I could find were in black and white which gives them all a very clean modern aesthetic, it also gives it a feel or darkness or fear which I want to portray in the article. I noticed that lots of examples I could find use text as the images as opposed to lines or shapes, not only does this illustrate the point but it also means I can easily add text from important words or quotes from the article.

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I decided to design a series of images taking influence from my research, creating one large image to be the centre piece of each page. I reviewed the article and looked at the paragraph in which I took the influence for my layout to take the most important quotes to sum up “yes, fear and no”.

Dave McDonnell, an English friend of Le Gallou’s, said that before he quit base jumping, he used to hear three distinct internal voices at the exit point, which he called “Yes,” “Fear” and “No.” “If you’re all tuned in, there’s ‘Yes,’ ” he said. “On the mediocre days, there are two other voices­. One’s ‘Fear.’ Your body is screaming out at you, ‘Don’t do this,’ because it’s dangerous, unnatural. You’re there to conquer your fear. But there’s another voice that hangs around every now and again, and that’s called ‘No.’ Something’s not right. You can never put your finger on it — it could be something in your pack job, or the weather, or the people you’re jumping with, or your mind-set. It’s just, ‘Walk away, don’t go jumping today.’ The difficulty is trying to discern between ‘Fear’ and ‘No,’ because they’re both telling you the same thing. ‘No’ is your sixth sense that’s trying to save your life.” Whatever voice Le Gallou heard that morning, he jumped.

I chose a phrase for each page which I thought encapsulated the feeling i wanted to convey within each page an each image. I thought i could use the phrase or words from the phrase within the image and could therefor also use the images and headers for each spread.

Image 1 – “If you’re all tuned in, there’s ‘Yes,’ “

The first spread is all about “YES”. What I took away from this in the article was that YES is the day when everything goes perfectly and runs smoothly, although the fear of jumping and the actual jump is scary and full of fear. I wanted to show the fear in the image and the maintain the aspect of La Gallou falling or being sucked in, but keep it clean and organised at the same time.

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My first idea stemmed from looking into map contour lines and optical illusions. Both of which use lines of different thicknesses to create the illusion of height, whether it’s something raising off the ground or being sucked into it. I wanted to create this illusion of being sucked into a ‘black hole’. Instead of using lines used the quote “all tuned in” as I thought I could use the image as a heading for the spread, it would illustrate the message as well as describe it to the audience. I wanted the image to be clean and structured to illustrate the idea of “YES” being when everything goes to plan, or in this case when “all tuned in”. Although both work well, I think the idea on the left is too simple and doesn’t illustrate the idea of a black hole well enough, whereas I think the idea on the right looks too messy and may be better suited to

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My first idea was simple, I rotated each letter and placed them all on top of each other to give the effect of each letter being piled on top of the other. I later added the shadows as it reiterates the idea of them being on top of each other, almost looking like they are falling on top of each other. The black background fits in with the monochrome theme and keeps to the idea of fear and darkness in the background. Again, I kept it looking clean and structured.

Image 2 – “Don’t do this. It’s dangerous, unnatural. You’re there to conquer your ‘FEAR’.”

For my image for my “FEAR” spread I chose to use the same idea I first looked at for the previous page, I decided not to use it for “YES” because I decided it looked a bit messy and did not fit in with the idea of that spread, however I think it would be much more suited to this page where I want my image to be styled more like that.

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I used the same process as before to create some more examples of this idea, using the words ‘FEAR’ as this is the standout word used to describe jumping with fear in the article. As I did before I wanted to give the feel of an illusion which would make the reader feel like they’re falling or being sucked into the screen. The influence was taken from an earlier idea I had of a black hole of which is never ending and also has connotations with fear and falling.

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After a few experiments trying out different styles and methods I decided the concept was strong but my 2 initial trials were not effective enough. I liked the idea for each but a little more work was needed to complete it. First off, using ‘FEAR’ in the image was too obvious so I decided to use the words “UNNATURAL” and “DANGEROUS” as I think both of them are such strong powerful words which are used to describe fear in the article, and will leave more the the imagination. The second trial I carried out was much stronger and created much more of a sense of depth as each ring was getting smaller so was a concept I wanted to take forward in my layout experiments

The last image especially gives the feeling of movement even though it’s a still image which I think is strong in itself. As the page was all about fear I wanted the image not just to act as a heading but all so really make the viewer feel like they’re being sucked in and give the impression of a never ending tunnel. This idea was all about giving the viewer a sense of falling just as Le Gallou would have, as well as giving an insight into the feelings and thoughts that could be going through his head, like fear and adrenaline. I think the design works well to capture this feeling.

Image 3 – “No, something’s not right. ‘No’ is your sixth sense trying to save your life. Whatever voice Le Hallou heard that morning, he jumped.”

The next page was all about “NO” which is about when somethings wrong and you shouldn’t go jumping, it was the page I wanted to use to describe his death, therefor I wanted the image to be quite dark and not particularly pleasant. As the idea behind the previous 2 images decreased in structure I wanted the last image to be even more messy and unstructured, to show how his final jump went wrong, and also to illustrate the idea of “something not being right”.

I used the liquify and warp tools both on illustrator and photoshop to change the structure of the words “HE JUMPED” as I thought those 2 words were strong and would instantly provoke a feeling when the viewer see’s it. I wanted the image to start off well and end up unstructured and out of control, much like Le Gallou’s final jump. I duplicated the words and placed each one under the other, and warped each line more and more each time so the bottom line would be unreadable.

My first attempt with just the outline of the words it aesthetically pleasing but isn’t bold enough and I don’t think it works well enough to capture the viewers attention. The idea behind it is strong, there is still a strong sense of movement and falling with it moving from the top of the page to the bottom, and the way it’s warped almost looks like it’s flowing, and the way it spreads and warps really gives a feeling of being out of control. However, I think it needs to be a slightly thicker font and possibly a larger size to really make it stand out and be moving to the viewer.

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After changing the font to a thicker/bolder style and enlarging it slightly I think it still keeps the same idea and is strong, and also stands out much more and almost pops off the page. Initially it was too wide so I narrowed it slightly. I think leaving a slight border on the sides but touching the top and bottom of the page really emphasises the idea of it falling from the top of the page to the bottom instead of it being in the middle of the page. I also trailed it in white which worked but I think the thick mass of black at the bottom adds a depth to it which you don’t get with the white.

Overall I think the image works really well to convey the meaning. It contains easy to read text so can be used as a header as well as keeping with the theme of each image becoming more and more out of control.

http://balladora.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-10-29T09:02:00%2B02:00&max-results=100&start=194&by-date=false

http://www.showusyourtype.com/public/index.php/postcards/melbourne

https://www.inspirationde.com/image/71672/

http://www.worthydesign.space/design

https://www.neuegoods.com/journal/2016/1/18/darren-oorloff

http://balladora.blogspot.co.nz/2011/12/susannste-fanizen-coverentwurfe.html

After choosing my layout and deciding what text to use on each page, I looked into the visuals and images I could use within the double page spreads.

The first idea I had was to use photographs of mountains or tall buildings, depending on which page, as the images on each page, using 2/3 on each spread. Although I have access to photos of both of these things, I felt this would be far too cliche and would illustrate exactly what was being said in the article too much, it would lead nothing to the imagination of the reader, especially as the brief is to design the article for young designers. There was also a large amount of quotes containing metaphors and amazing visuals which I felt would be much more effective.

The first idea I looked into was the idea of using typography instead of images to illustrate the article. There are some standout quotes and words within the article which I decided I could use to good effect such as BASE, and “YES, FEAR, NO” which are used in one of the quotes within the article. I wanted the words to be large on the page and take up as much space as a photo or other image would, they would also be used as a header on each spread.

I then looked into the idea of contour lines and cartography on a map. I was interested with the way maps use contour lines to show the height of hills or mountains and think it would be a good way to show mountains or cliffs without having to include photographs. It would also be a good visual to add and could overlay with other images or photographs to create more visuals. After looking at a variety of examples of contour lines, I noticed that although they look like a raised surface, it could also be seen as the opposite, which links in with my idea of a black hole or illusion of something being sucked into or falling into the page.

I then took influence from the idea of the contour lines as well as the illustration to give a sense of the viewer being sucked into the page, or into the ‘black hole’. I wanted to give the viewer a sense how La Gallou would feel when jumping off a cliff or building, in terms of giving a feeling of falling as well as the feeling and adrenaline going on inside his head. I wanted to experiment with this idea using illusions and expressive typography.

The plan was to create 3 images, 1 for each page using ideas from above, which all give a sense of falling that will make the viewer feel as if they’re falling or being sucked into the page.

Following on from my idea to use “YES, FEAR, AND NO” as my 3 spreads, I wanted to create an image for each spread which give a feeling of each of the emotions. “YES” was described as “when you’re all tuned in”, therefor I want the image for it to be clean and all in proportion, whilst still giving a sense of illusion and a sense of falling. “FEAR” was described in the article as “Don’t do this. It’s dangerous, unnatural. You’re there to conquer your ‘FEAR’.”, so I wanted the image on the ‘fear’ page to have a strong sense of fear using the idea of being sucked into a black hole and falling into the page, I want it to make the viewer to understand and feel how La Gallou would feel. As opposed to “YES” I don’t want the image to be as clean and in proportion, I think it would be more effective with a slightly distorted look as it gives a feel of the FEAR and shows how skydiving can be scary and unpredictable. Finally, in the article when describing “NO”, it says “No, something’s not right. ‘No’ is your sixth sense trying to save your life. Whatever voice Le Hallou heard that morning, he jumped.” For this image I want it to be the most moving of all and really illustrate La Gallou’s last jump going from an amazing morning and amazing views to a disastrous jump.

The brief is about taken one of 10 given articles and creating a contemporary piece of editorial design for it. I initially skimmed through all 10 articles to find any which stood out to me and seemed interesting to read as I thought the articles which were the most interesting to read would also be the most interesting visually. After reading the majority of them, I focused in on ‘The life and death of Herve La Gallou’ and ‘The class pay gap’. Although initially the article about the class pay gap stood out to me the most due to how interesting the facts are within it, ‘The life and death of Herve La Gallou’ to me had so many more interesting metaphors and amazing imagery within it that I decided to go choose it.

After reading the article it was made clear that there already seemed to be 3/4 different ‘chapters’ within the article which I could use to separate into each double page spread. The beginning was all about his life and his base jumps and skydives, around the middle was a lot of information about how he feels when he jumps and the reasons he does it, and the end of the article was all about the day of his death and the events following on from his death. Due to this, I decided to separate the text into these 3 sections, using one of them on each double page spread.

PAGE 1-2 = HIS LIFE AND HIS BASE JUMPS

Le Gallou was an unremarkable-looking man of medium height, with a slim physique, short brown hair and wide eyes. I met him only once: in January 2009, at a restaurant in Paris. A friend had told me about an astonishing coup that took place months earlier in Dubai, in which Le Gallou and McDonnell walked into the Burj Khalifa skyscraper, then under construction, disguised as engineers. They evaded security, climbed 155 floors on foot and then flung themselves from the top at dawn — thus becoming the first people to base-jump from the tallest building in the world. I wanted Le Gallou himself to tell me about the adventure.

He also described a vivid scene at the top of the Burj. Le Gallou explained that when he was in his late 40s, he began to suffer from night blindness. As a result, he preferred to wait until dawn to jump buildings he infiltrated in the dark. At the exit point, he and McDonnell watched the desert turn from blue to pink as day broke over Dubai. At that moment, Le Gallou later recalled, “you feel everything belongs to you.”

We spoke too of his other notable coups. In 2000, he and a friend, Benoît Paquet, scaled the exterior of the 88-story Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai in the middle of the night and jumped at dawn. By 2009, Le Gallou had also jumped from the Eiffel Tower 40 times. He had, he said, become the de facto “official guide” of the Parisian landmark for novice jumpers — the one who knew how to evade the cameras and guards.

These stories granted Le Gallou near-mythic status among European base jumpers. (After Dubai, his friends jokingly nicknamed him l’Aigle d’Arabie: the Eagle of Arabia.) For McDonnell, Le Gallou’s urban adventures were “the nearest thing you could get to being a master criminal, without getting into too much trouble.” Unless you were involved in base jumping, however, it’s very unlikely you would ever have heard of Le Gallou. In recent years, several base jumpers have gained a high public profile. Men like Jeb Corliss and Felix Baumgartner — the daredevil who sky-dived from the edge of space — have become YouTube stars, backed by brands like Red Bull. But Le Gallou was not after fame. He maintained a Web site, but it was rudimentary; he preferred to share stories face to face.

The sport he loved began in earnest in the late 1970s, when a group of American parachutists led by Carl Boenish started jumping El Capitan, above the Yosemite Valley, using regular sky-diving equipment. There had been similar jumps before — for movie stunts and one-off kicks — but it was Boenish and his gang who invented the term B.A.S.E. (for Building, Antenna, Span, Earth, four types of objects from which it is possible to jump).

One of Le Gallou’s oldest jumping buddies, Joel Gerardin, said that for Le Gallou, the thrill of infiltrating a building, jumping it and escaping without notice was “indescribable.” He added: “I actually don’t know anyone else in Europe who gained such an experience in city jumps, ‘illegally,’ with no sponsorship, all around the world. Not for the image of himself, just for himself.”

PAGE 3 -4 = HIS FEAR AND HOW HE FEELS WHEN HE JUMPS

When Le Gallou made his first jump in 1994, only a few dozen people in France knew what base jumping was. He was already a proficient sky diver. Having bought a base rig and learned to pack from a video, he traveled to the Fades Viaduct near Clermont-Ferrand in southern France, steeled himself and jumped alone. The experience was a revelation.

“When you see the ground coming up very fast — it’s more like a suicide than a sport,” he told me. “I was almost sure that I was going to die, you know? Because it was so frightening. And when I jumped, I pulled. And then you have to wait for the opening of the canopy. And when you are waiting, the feeling is . . . I don’t know the word in English.Impuissant?”

Powerless. Le Gallou spent the rest of his life trying to take control of those heart-stopping milliseconds. In order to survive an intermittently illegal sport in which one mistake can be fatal, a jumper needs to be alert to myriad dangers. For a start, you carry only one parachute, rather than the two used in traditional sky diving. Not only must your chute be packed exactly right, it must also be pulled at the correct time, with enough distance between you, the object and the ground. Even when the canopy is released properly, a menu of potential problems awaits. If, for instance, you open “off-heading,” or less than straight, you can find yourself speeding back toward the cliff or building from which you just jumped. This outcome is known, in the macabre argot of the sport, as an “object strike.”

For these reasons, the sport has traditionally appealed as much to control freaks as to adrenaline junkies. Many European base jumpers of Le Gallou’s generation are middle-aged men and women (but mostly men) with solid professions: dentistry, engineering, I.T. and so on. Few seem to lead particularly risky lives. They view the sport as a private obsession, and publicity, especially for those in high-profile jobs, is to be avoided.

PAGE 5-6 = THE DAY OF HIS DEATH

A minute before he died, Hervé le Gallou stood at the edge of a cliff at Obiou, in the French Alps, with acres of thin air before him. The view that morning, June 23, 2012, was breathtaking: moonscape cliff faces, pocked with snow, that gave way to plateaus of pale grass and ashen rock, then to bottle-green pine forests in the valley below and to mountains beyond.

“I know exactly what I’m doing,” he said. “I just go for pleasure. There is still some stress, some fear, because there is some danger. But I know exactly what I can do. I know where is my limit.”

At 51, Le Gallou was a veteran of thousands of base jumps. But he had never flown from the exit point at Obiou before. In order to execute his intended flight, he needed to guide himself away from the cliff face, and then sharply to the right, over a rocky outcrop. For an experienced pilot, this maneuver was relatively straightforward. The next period of the flight, however, was tricky. Le Gallou would need to glide over a long, moderately inclined plateau. In order to do so, it was imperative that he pay attention to what French wingsuit pilots call la finesse: the ratio of forward to downward movement. (To maximize lift and finesse, a pilot needs to find the perfect “angle of attack” — the best position of the wings in relation to the wind.)

If he couldn’t maintain an adequate glide in this part of the flight, he had an escape: he could pull his parachute and land on the plateau. This plan would work as long as he made the decision early enough. But if he bailed too late, he would crash before his chute could fill with air. The best case would be the simplest: to fly with “une bonne finesse,” continue over the inclined plateau and the pine trees and eventually pull his chute above the valley floor.

On the morning of June 23, the chances of a long, birdlike flight in perfect conditions seemed good. Nonetheless, dark thoughts may have assailed Le Gallou. He was fatigued, short on practice and unhappy with his equipment. The previous day, moreover, he received news that his mother was involved in a car accident in Paris, the latest in a string of misfortunes that had bedeviled his family in recent months.

On that June morning, four other jumpers were with Le Gallou at Obiou. Two were Americans who moved to France, partly to spend more time flying wingsuits in the Alps: Ellen Brennan, a 25-year-old nurse, and her partner, Laurent Frat, a 35-year-old news producer. The others were Raoul, a 38-year-old engineer and a friend of Le Gallou’s (who asked to be identified by only his nickname because it is not publicly known that he base-jumps); and Ludovic Woerth, a 32-year-old professional wingsuit pilot and a former employee at Adrenalin Base, a French base-equipment supplier. Le Gallou was wearing a wingsuit provided by Adrenalin Base and manufactured by a Croatian company, Phoenix-Fly.

Raoul jumped first, and then Woerth. Having completed their flights, they waited in the valley for the others. Le Gallou jumped third. His flight started well, according to Brennan and Frat. He banked high over the rocky outcrop and then dropped out of sight. The two Americans jumped fourth and fifth. When they landed in the valley, after flights of more than a minute, they asked about Le Gallou. Neither Raoul nor Woerth had seen him.

Le Gallou’s four fellow jumpers hoped their friend had pulled his parachute safely above the plateau. The whole flight path is not visible from either the valley or the exit point, and it was possible, they believed, that he could have landed unseen. After hiking for a while to get better phone reception, they tried to call Le Gallou. Nothing. Brennan remembers the group opening beers to celebrate their successful jumps while they waited for news.

“Just after like the first sip of beer maybe, we heard a helicopter coming over,” Brennan recalled. “And the helicopters never fly over there unless they’re doing a rescue or something. . . . The worst sound I’ve ever heard in my life was the sound of that helicopter coming.”

A passing hiker saw the fallen Le Gallou and called mountain rescue. Le Gallou had hit the plateau and died on impact, his canopy stretched out behind him. In the days that followed, three of the jumpers posted accounts on base Web sites, detailing what they thought went wrong with Le Gallou’s last flight. Frat wrote that “for reasons we can only speculate, he was unable to outfly the plateau.”

In todays lecture we were given our brief for our editorial project and were given a short lecture on layouts and grid systems, hierarchy, type elements and detailing within an editorial piece as well as the use of pace throughout an article or magazine.

For our short workshop task, we were split into groups and had to create a double page spread each using a given topic. My grouped picked out the topic of ‘Coachella’ and had to crete an article all about the festival. We each designed a page each but had to use all the elements taught to us in the morning to make the article look professional and as if they had all been made by the same person, for the same article. We decided that we first needed to come up with a visual identity that would be similar across the whole article but would also not look exactly the same to create a sense of pace. We decided on things like the colours we wanted to use, the type, layout (grid system), and how we wanted our paragraphs to be laid out.

As a group we spoke about the things we discussed with David in our tutorial about how we wanted the article to make the reader feel, and after discussing this and carrying out some research into the festival we we ultimately decided that Coachella has had criticism recently for being more about the ‘vibes’ it creates and less about the actual music. We wanted our article to show this and so decided that the images within our article would be the most prominent aspect and would take up the majority of the page. Coachella is always at the very peak of what is currently going on, with the music, fashion and style of the festival all being very modern, we wanted to convey this in our article using a very modern and contemporary feel.

I wanted to use the image as the first thing that draws the eye to create a sense of hierarchy, followed by the ‘Coachella’ heading, then the body text, then the caption. I didn’t want the article to be too informative as as I said previously the festival has become more about the idea of going to the festival and less about the music and the actual festival itself, therefor I wanted to portray this within the article. Overall after only having a short amount of time to create it, I think it works well and uses a lot of the elements we spoke about in the tutorial to create a strong double page spread.