read!

new type project is so fun! we're participating in an aiga poster contest for an organization called "reach out and read," who are working with pediatricians to hand out books at check-ups along with information about the importance of reading, even very young, from a trusted, medical source.

this is particularly meaningful to me because i know (or at least have been reminded on a good handful of occasions) how much my parents read to me when i was little, and i know how much i lived to read growing up. looks like a typo, right? loved to read? which is also true. but seriously. both loved and lived to read, all the time, glasses by the time i was 8 years old, that kind of little kid. and then the whole winning spelling bees and high standardized test scores for all the reading/comprehension/verbal things. babies don't just grow up and figure that stuff out. doing well in language comes from being read to and spoken to and encouraged and given lots of books! (thanks, mum and dad!)

so anyway. a cause dear to my heart.

our constraints: let the posters be typographically dominant, or strictly type. eaaasy-peasy wide-open assignment! we began with 16 sketches for posters (i probably am not going to post them on here, because they're not very impressive), at least 8 using only type and then the rest featuring some kind of imagery, if we wanted.

through chatting with a small group and eventually presenting our sketches to the class, we settled on 3 directions apiece, the starts of which being due today.

these were my three directions!

and a physical prototype that looks a little something like this: 

the eventual incarnation of which i will be photographing with two hands holding the pages open, in a full sized book, rather than a tiny dollar tree bible. sorry, bible. it's nothing personal or willfully sacrilegious.  it's just that you were so convenient and inexpensive. if for some reason you were unable to determine, the letters are construction paper on a piece of wire.

i think my text is going to be the "read to me!" tagline from the other poster, because that's so much more direct, and demands immediate action from parents rather than the waffle-y "you should read to your child this much because science" that, although factual and enlightening, is less likely to inspire a quick change. 

so now i have to build that book (i spent so long at half-price trying to find a hardback book with text in public domain that god-forbid had some nice illustrations. the one i got is brothers grimm! and the illustrations are great! and it was only a dollar fifty! well worth all the hunting.) and buckle back into photography.

i sure do miss reading sometimes.