A Website for the Information Modelling and Web Technologies course of the master's degree in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge of the University of Bologna
The website allows the user to change the typographic style accoring to the layout charcateristics of specific historical periods. Moreover, the issues section can be used to track and tag entities in the published texts, as well as to compare different texts according to the user's particular purposes.
In the comparison mode, metadata and entities-related fetures can be accessed by means of a modal, which can be activated by a button on the right side that appears only in two cases: when the user is in the comparison mode and when the screen is not enough wide to display the single-text-modal in a suitable way.
The magazine's topic is a personal choice of the project's authors. The selected texts has been chosen among authoritative articles aiming at analyzing conspiracies from differnet points of view. In particular, the issue where the texts are contained focuses on the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and, therefore, containes only articles and book-chapters dealing with this topic. This choice has been made so to provide the users with the possibility of comparing documents with references to similar entities. The entities we decided to highlight are the ones that made more sense to focus on given the topic, named people, places, organizations, events and concepts. Moreover, also general keywords without a specific refrence to the entity type can be added and highlighted.
We decided to refer to this year as a year of "transition" from the incunabula-period to the principles that governed western printing to the late 18th century. In particular, we took inspiration from the typographic type of incunabula, which are the ones "made with movable type on a printing press in the style of Johann Gutenberg" and, starting from here, we decided to adapt to the current medium the canonical structures governing the layut of books printed during the 16th century. It would have been difficult to grasp each detail of about an entire century of print and typographic history, also because "the spread of printing to cities both in the North and in Italy ensured that there was great variety in the texts and the styles which appeared." Therefore, we decided to stick with the basic principles and the main features of these editions.
We believe that the design and layout of the 40s were truly elegant and timeless, and we aim to re-discover the elegance of this period through this style. In order to do that, we decided to take inspiration from the Time magazine of these years, which has been, and it is still today, one of the most successfull magazines of all times. The history of the Time begins in the 1922 and its first issue appeared in 1923. In a few years it became a worldwide known magazine.
The Swiss Grid Style, or International Typographic Style, was maily developed in Switzerland during the 1950s. It is maily characterized by a cold, emotionally sterile grid style. The graphic artists used structured layout, and unjustified type. They searched for anonymous, objective visual communication. They chose photographic images rather than illustration, and typefaces that were industrial-looking rather than those designed for books. The asymmetrical organization of the design elements on a grid was used to create visual unity in the composition and another important characteristic is the consistent use of negative space, matte colour palettes and the match of monstrous and tiny letters for accents, bold and thing letters.
Spoiler: our time-machine widget is not so powerful to project us to the future in order to bring back some reality-based inspiration (we are sorry for that). For obvious lacks of technological diffusion and availability, we were not able to construct a complete sensorial experience surrounding the user from different points of view. Therefore, our main priority remained the one of imagine and present what the (near) future could look like from a typographic and layout-related perspective, with a little margin of citationism towards common fanta-scientific beliefs and cultural references.
The project's purpose is to explore various types of typographic and layout style for text documents, as an end-of-course project for the "Information Modeling and Web technologies" course of the Master Degree in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge of the University of Bologna, under prof. Fabio Vitali. The documents contained in the web site have been selected for their length and complexity and their publication here is not intended to be an alternative or replace their original locations:
- Panic, pizza and mainstreaming the alt-right
- From Pizzagate to the Great Replacement
- The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?.
All copyrights and related rights on the content remain with their original owners. All copyright on the typographic and layout choices are 2022 © The Conspiracist.
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