Diving into Tartt's Secrety History through a Whirlwind of Compositions

Continuing with the typographical theme, here are a few selections from the 45 compositions I've been working on for Donna Tartt's The Secret History. A lot of graphic design (at least this kind of project) is experimental; trying layouts and then different layouts and then revisions of those successful layouts to eventually achieve a final composition. Now, keep in mind, I am very new to this and have yet to successfully achieve my final piece. A lot of this is experimental and some are sort of successful and some are down right pathetic (I attempted to sort those ones out).

The 2nd set of 15 (the 1st ones were hand cut and hand taped) we were allowed to use one color (plus black), one font family, and play with 2 different font sizes. To help achieve thoughtful positioning, we used a 3 x 5 grid and adhered the text elements to either sides of the square.

I chose to put this one up because surprisingly, it got a lot of response. People liked the oversized type and difference in color. September 1992 is the publishing date (for those who are wondering). Selby told me I needed to work on developing a hierarchy and refining my title because it was getting lost in my design (Agreed Selby, I tried to keep that in mind while diving into my next set of 15).

The next set of 15 we did over the weekend. This time, Selby told us to be inspired by abstraction. Become more experimental with our layouts and develop a more expressive style compared to our previous 15. Not knowing exactly how far to take it, this was a difficult and quite time consuming assignment for me. I did a set of 10 and became very frustrated with what developed. Being very much a hands-on person, I decided I needed to print them off and take a step back. So this is me, attempting to work out the kinks (my roommate is such a trooper, we have so many horrible drafts tacked up on our walls from all my design studios):

Based on those revisions, I redesigned those 10 plus 5 more, leading to 15 attempted abstract expressive compositions. Here are a couple that I deemed successful (however, we'll see what everyone else has to say in the critique today):