Sequential Book Design - Stephen Colbert

I am a little behind posting this, but I was busy wrapping up the semester.  My apologies.  My third project in Graphic Design 1 this semester was to create a book on anyone that had been on the TIME 100 List.  The TIME 100 is a list of the most important or influential people of the year. People like Albert Einstein, Barack Obama, Winston Churchill, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have all appeared on these lists. Recently TIME has started making a section for users/reader to vote for their favorite influential people as well.  So the source pool for these people has grown gigantically in the last decade alone.  Since this project had existed for quite a few years, our professor let us branch out from the traditional list they give (of the People of the Century issue that celebrated the 20th Century) and let us pick who we wanted.  Originally I was drawn between doing something about someone like Winston Churchill who help change the world during World War 2, or someone current an more immediately recognizable for a challenge of making something that would appeal to a different crowd since I had to make a book about them, or some aspect of their life and why they were on the TIME 100.  I picked Stephen Colbert to the chagrin of my professor who insisted that I do someone that wasn’t pop culture since my last project was about sci-fi movies.  I had something to prove though, so I did it anyway.

When I started the project I had already known about Stephen Colbert and the character he portrays on The Colbert Report, Dr. Stephen Tiberius Colbert. Stephen, coming from the Carolinas to Chicago’s Second City improv group where his connections eventually made his way on to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Craig Kilborne right before the transition to Jon Stewart’s reign.  Stephen did most of his work behind the scenes even though he acted as one of the correspondents on the show, writing and sculpting the new direction the show eventually would take to it’s current fame.  There he and Jon Stewart created the solid foundation of “fake news” and Stephen crafted his character, who after the 2004 election got his own show called The Colbert Report (modeled after right wing pundits like Bill O’Reilly.)

Not only has his show become a success, he has created words recognized my Merriam Webster (not to mention being Truthiness was their Word of the Year), publicly roasted the Bush Administration only feet away from President George Bush himself and has had his DNA digitally encoded and launched into space amongst other things.  So, in my research, I went into these things, as well as what effects his show, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart have had.  (If you are interested I can send you the copy, just email me.)

Here are some of the pages from the book. Click on any of them to enlarge in a new window.

The Cover:

The blue section is part of the dust jacket’s design.

Each section had an introduction spread using a different image of Stephen opposite to a quote of his that touched on the subject matter of the chapter.

Then after this spread was one created as the content of the book.  On the left was information about the chapter, and carrying on what Stephen did in his I Am America (And So Can You) book he wrote, the margins have anecdotes about the paragraph they are near.  To the right is some photos and information under them relating to the subject of the chapter.

Once I established the framework to the book, the next thing I wanted to do was create a unique and appealing spread that took on a typographic, image or diagrammatic appearance to them (one, to meet the project’s requirements and two, for variation).  Here are examples of what I did for each chapter (type dominate, balanced but diagonal layout, image dominate and diagrammatic):

Then this was the back cover:

I will post some photographs of the completed book as soon as I can.  If you have any questions or anything let me know.  I had a lot of fun making this book, the actual construction of it though was a bit of a learning process, but when I recreate it for Junior Review I have no doubt I should perfect the process by then.