OUGD404 - Studio Brief 02 - Study Task 03 - Type Setting

For this study task, I was given the objective to re typeset Lewis Carrolls - A Mouses Tale using a postmodern approach and a modernist approach.

The Mouse's Tale
by Lewis Carroll

"Mine is a long and a sad tale!" said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing. "It is a long tail, certainly," said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse's tail; "but why do you call it sad?" And she kept on puzzling about it while the Mouse was speaking, so that her idea of the tale was something like this:—
Fury said to a mouse, That he met in the house, 
“Let us both go to law: I will prosecute you.”
Come, I'll take no denial,
We must have a trial,
For really this morning I've nothing to do.
Said the mouse to the cur, 
“Such a trial, dear sir, 
With no jury or judge, 
would be wasting our breath.”
“I’ll be judge, I'll be jury” 
Said cunning old Fury; 
“I’ll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death."

I began with some research into the poem and found that the text of the poem already has a style of it's own.

The poem itself is part of the book 'Alices Adventures in Wonderland'. An image of the original poem is below. 

The poem is about a mouse speaking of it'self in third person, the overall feeling to the poem is a negative one.

As the poem continues the amount of lines it is structured by becomes increasingly shorter and shorter meaning eventually after only a few words the poem needs to start on a new line. the reason for this style is so that the poem 'looks like a mouses tale'. It is quite effective being that this is a poem about a mouses tale in the shape of a mouses tale. 

After looking at the original poem I noticed that it already has it's own post modern style. It is not a modernist design as it does not fit in with today's society idea of modern design, but it is postmodern. In a way that how the poem has been structured breaks the boundaries of what most poem structures usually look like, 'more or less box shaped'. I would say it is refreshing to see something different. 

I then started working on my own post modern structure for the poem, playing around with the lines and the shape. 

I ended up with sort of following the same theme as the original design but putting the text in a different structure, the wavy lines is the perfect post modern example, which let me break the boundaries of normal text box shape but still allowed the text to be readable.

Then my own version of a modernistic design, was a little more simple and easier to achieve, whilst thinking of minimalism and ease of access and use, I found myself concentrating where exactly the text would fit on the page, rather than the structure of the text itself. 

So I decided to keep the text structure center left of page so i got the idea of perfection and simplicity to the reader also to give a sense that

'something is more modernistic and different about this', I lined the title, vertically against thetext.