Design Solutions

Having looked at other pieces of typography and garden related design work, here are a few possible ideas that I could choose from:

• Informative posters - schools - science, doctors Surgeries (medicine related), festivals, fairs, shows
• Drugs leaflet - process of drugs with images, diagrams/flow charts
• Magazine, font cover, double page spreads
• T-shirts, postcards, maps, calendars
• Booklet, photographs, illustrations, web design, japanese artwork/gardens
• Book - poetry, music, religion/spiritual, paintings, slide shows, metaphors, dandelion seeds
• Typographic family trees, poisonous but beautiful flowers - smell in type etc
• T.V shows - Weeds, Breaking bad (Drug related American t.v. shows - design work of covers etc
• The outdoors - Ray Mears, Bear Grylls, garden tools, adverts etc
• The four seasons
• Animals

After thinking about possible design solutions for this project, I have decided to design a book of Haiku which will include photographs of flowers/plants that I will take myself and a Haiku poem that matches well with the image.  I will use a suitable typeface and combine this with the photo to create a page of the booklet.  I need to make sure that my images do not overpower the typography as I need this to be the main focal point.  I may go for a really elegant style or possibly a quite bold/bright modern style.  Below are a few examples of Haiku that may help me when designing my own.  Some are just text and others are a mixture of media's. These may also help me to come up with a layout for my designs too.

Haiku is a poetic form and a type of poetry from the Japanese culture. Haiku combines form, content, and language in a meaningful, yet compact form. Haiku poets, write about everyday things. Many themes include nature, feelings, or experiences. Usually they use simple words and grammar. The most common form for Haiku is three short lines. The first line usually contains five syllables, the second line seven syllables, and the third line contains five syllables. Haiku doesn't rhyme. A Haiku must "paint" a mental image in the reader's mind. This is the challenge of Haiku - to put the poem's meaning and imagery in the reader's mind in only 17 syllables over just three lines of poetry. Japanese Haiku poems are very different from haiku poems in English. You can express a lot more ideas with 17 English syllables than with 17 Japanese syllables. This difference isn't present only in haiku poems, this differance come from people who translate Western musicals to Japanese. A large part of the art of haiku poems is expressing an idea in the limited environment. Since the English Haiku poems are allowed more degrees of freedom than their Japanese counterpart, they're playing a different game. In Japanese, one noun and a connective phrase will easily take up five syllables; in English, short sentences using common words often fits in five syllables. Here are a few examples of Haiku:

As the wind does blow

        Across the trees, I see the

                Buds blooming in May.

It’s cold—and I wait

For someone to shelter me

And take me from here.

Everything I touch

        with tenderness, alas,

                  pricks like a bramble.

                         The crow has flown away

         swaying in the evening sun,

a leafless tree.

Falling to the ground,

          I watch a leaf settle down

                 In a bed of brown.

  

                        Light of the moon

            Moves west, flowers' shadows

Creep eastward.

I think it would be best to choose my Haiku poems first before I take my photographs, I will choose around 6 poems that could work and that will make a really interesting photograph. This book will be suitable for young adults and upwards and will interest people who love nature, plants etc and english literature, design and typography.