Fighting for An Audience highlights the spectacle of violence and tragedy. Its connection the spectacle and awe of wrestling and it's misinterpretation of portraying intentional violence to the spectacle of suffering and how the media alters how we view and react to suffering on a global scale.
This project is a typographic exploration of reframing excerpts and sections of The World of Wrestling" by Roland Barnes and two additional sources of my choice to conceptually compliment with the base text. In forming a coherent collection, a hardcover bound book, an 8 page newsprint and a short motion trailer were developed to speak on the connection between spectacle of performative fighting and captured violence in different formats. A combination of headlines, short text, photo illustrations and data visualization were made consistent in creating a visual thread between all portions of the project.
The newspaper designed tied with with the book is titled "Fight, Perform, Suffer", the three large themes involved in the text of the book. In designing this, I worked with traditional editorial layout concepts while keeping its visual elements aligned with its overall branding. The challenge in laying out this piece together was in containing all of the text from the book into the 8 pages I chose to work with for this part of the project.
The final part of this project was to create a short promotional video for our book and newspaper. The direction that I choose to go with the video vastly differed from my dense, detailed approach that I took with both print aspects of the project. I was inspired by the SNL comedian introductions designed by Pentagram, I wanted to design name introductions for individuals whose quotes I have included in the book and newspaper.
The style of the type for the names are also meant to create a re-occurrence of style with the cover of the newspaper. The video itself is about 20 seconds.