Concept and First Layouts of Gertrude Anthology

Like in my video, I wish to express the cubist influences of Gertrude Stein. More important for the anthology, I wish to express the intended neutrality of Stein's poetry. It is abstract poetry and she writes it to avoid any preconceived concepts to be interjected into the reading of the words. This neutrality will show in my anthology by framing each passage of poetry on a square surface. The square is a shape that has always denoted neutrality and regularity while a rectangular page would typically denote a narrative of sorts. Furthermore, the type will be arranged on the page in a way that does not depict the top of the page. The "page" can be held and read anyway it's orientated. The type itself will more than likely conform to a geometric typeface to further reference cubism and the sounds created by the words and letters of the poetry.

These first two compositions explore what direction to go with orientation of words and type use. The upper composition was the chosen general direction with a more expressive composition and geometric sans serif typeface. 

For this set of three compositions, I was running with the idea of layering my compositions. I have decided to create the anthology as unbound separate pieces of poetry. This allows for the viewer to look at each poem from any perspective and to not be bound by the orientation of the book when viewing the page of poetry. To enrich this unbound and individual viewing of the poetry by each viewer, I chose to cut out a hole in the compositions (the large black space) and orientate the type around this "cubist hole". These layered holes were then going to create different viewpoints of the poetry lying underneath each layer, like so: