Five New Terms for Piers Plowman - concept, authoring 2003 design 2007
My senior year at Georgia State I designed the thesis that I wrote for honors my senior year at Emory. It was tedious re-typing all that copy. It was inspiring how much nerdy stuff I knew.
It was five new terms with which to discuss the late mediveal visionary experience.
I swear it wasn't as boring as it sounds ... there are plenty of illustrations, short stories about me explaining the thesis to my roommate while we drink bourbon, and little sections of frustrated, angsty academic anger.
I devised my understanding of visionary poetry through modern visionary poets and thinkers ... Rimbaud and Niezsche among others ...
I remember that most of the other thesis writers were doing work on more contemporary issues. Race and Gender, Postmodern critiques, post-colonial experience. They all received highest honors. I only got high honors! Even though I gave them five whole new words! Something concrete, almost tangible! Words they could put in their mouth! Yes, whole new words they'd never spoken before!
Now they could be all like, "Whoa! Check out all these new words I have!" and other people would be like, "Those are some wild words! I've never heard those words before!" and they could be all like, "Yeah, I know! They're brand new whole words!"
But, I was happy enough with the high honors. It was pretty good, considering I'm not all that smart.
And the design:
Well, it's perfect bound with a thin cardstock cover with a die cut title, and the interior pages are printed on laid paper. I wanted something really clean, but not stylishly clean. I stayed with classic typefaces ... Helvetica for heading type and quotations, and Baskerville for body type. Quotations were also distinguished with cyan ink.
I used wide margins and two columns per page ... Gutenberg-esque (though the pages are much squatter).
I only got a "B" on this project.
But, I was happy enough with the "B" ...
