The Grid is Dead, Long Live the Grid
So it turns out that I really dislike working on paper with grids.
Have a look back at my previous blog post if that sentence seems to come out of nowhere. In it I laid out a methodology for making a series of collages for an art book. The book would be equal parts DIY manual, exploration of how I work, and actual collage pieces. In the blog post I set out the first step, which was defining the grids. Then a couple days later I started making the first collages based on them. It was painful. While I like the collages I made, I cannot find any excitement in continuing the project as set out.
Part of the point of the grid approach is that the grid has no inherent meaning. It’s a construct based purely on the relationships between modules. My full grid was 16 modules, broken into four regions of 2x2, 1x2, 1x4, and 2x3. By choosing the right content, you could make the smallest module the most interesting module. Or you could divide one module into several smaller ones, if the image itself had clear divisions. What I like about this intellectually is that all meaning or interpretation lies purely in the content. Templates force a certain kind of creativity. It’s how we can still be writing haikus when their form is so tightly constrained and hasn’t changed in centuries.
So yeah, let’s use a grid and see what happens.
First off, I like these three collages, but they were really hard to make. To keep going with the haiku analogy, you can’t crop words the way you can crop images. I imagine plenty of haiku authors use contractions and abbreviations, but it’s not like you take the word „discombobulation“ and cut it down to „mbobul“ to make it fit. I imagine your average reader wouldn’t read „mbobul“ as a reference to „discombobulation“. It would just be nonsense letters (I am excited to hear about all the haiku authors who do exactly what I’m saying isn’t done, so please send links).
Collage (in the style I like to work) is all about this kind of cropping, interesting juxtapositions, and relationships between the contents as they were designed versus how they’re appearing in the new composition. This sounds like it would work great in a grid - but how do you know which pages, images, or letters to cut down to what size? One valid and interesting way would be to cut down dozens and hundreds of images into the four sizes and dimensions, then keep moving them around like puzzle pieces until you found a good combination. Maybe if I had twice as much source material as I do, and if I could automate the cropping - but ach! I can’t just cut up some of these images and papers without knowing where they’ll go. I have a finite number of pages. There’s no undo if I cut an image down, then realise that it would have worked great, differently cropped, with this other piece of paper over here. Or maybe with this other one.
I can make those cuts and crops in the moment of creating a collage. That’s the fun of it. Those are the stakes of working on paper - and the stakes make the decisions meaningful. But doing it just to make a library of pieces that are based on an arbitrary grid, no thanks.
The alternative is to lay pages over photos, over letters, and imagine how they’d crop down. Then slide one a little bit to see if it’d be better there, then try another photo and move the first image by mistake. Then realise I’ve moved off the grid and try to slide the whole thing back over. It’s frustration for no real benefit. Maybe if the grid wasn’t arbitrary it would be more interesting. Maybe if I based it off the Golden Mean, or numerology, or some kind of occult calculations, maybe then I’d find this futzing worth it.
Now I’m back to the drawing board on the book project. I have an idea or two for a different through line, but nothing concrete enough to talk about yet.
I’m also left with one collage that works pretty well, despite my struggles with it. (pictured at the top, and below). It’s not in the store yet, but will be within a day or two.
One last thought on grids
Where they work beautifully is digitally. In a fraction of the time it took me to make these three collages, I scanned four totally random pages from my collage library, built the exact same grid in After Effects, and came up with an animation for an imaginary book of female alpinists. Making this was a blast, and comparatively simple. Image masks are a long-ago solved problem in editing and animation and they’re fun to work with.
Anyone out there know someone at Penguin who’s looking for a book cover animator?