This book is the outcome of another second year brief where we were tasked with creating a book based on a single word which would be allocated to us at random. The word I received was ‘adaptation’.
After researching various interpretations of the word, I discovered articles about how the eye adapts to light and dark. Given my limited knowledge on the subject and it’s scientific content, I chose to create a book aimed at secondary school children describing the process that the eye goes through when adapting to extreme changes in light and dark. Whilst researching, a statement that stood out was that when entering a dark envirnoment, the eye adapts to define ‘what is black’. This defined the books content as a whole and was an obvious choice for a title. Throughout the book, I experimented with colour, leading, kerning and various layouts to explain the content described in a visual manner that would be more accessible to a younger audience. Given the subject manner, I also used traditional optotype structures to give the pages the feel of material you would typically read from at an optician appointment.
The contents page represents the way the eye refracts information that is reinterpretated the correct way way up again once it hits the optical nerve
Another example of optotype
In this section of the book, I represented dark adaptation by making the type difficult to read through a combination of printing black on black, varying the baseline, weight, kerning, leading and alignment. As the section goes on, the text becomes clearer just as your vision would after some time in a dark environment.
