In this project, I chose the Sabon font for my research and letterform design. I wanted to capture the 16th century essence that fueled the inspiration behind Jan Tschichold's (the designer of Sabon) font. Specifically for my design idea with Sabon, I aimed to adapt the 16th century for the contemporary era in a way that publishers would do for centuries-old books.

I first created an ornamental baroque-style frame border to place around my Sabon title. I decided to use the Baroque palette in Illustrator which served as colors inspired by the Medieval era. I played around with kerning for the characters in my Sabon title, as well as tracking for the rest of the smaller text. I was particularly inspired by books like The Canterbury Tales, so I chose to provide two pages for the front cover and the back cover of mty "book." On the edges of the pages, I added a strip of gold to contrast with the muted green in the background. Additionally, for contrast, I outlined the strokes of the 2nd and 3rd lines of subtext to balance with the image in the background.

For the front cover, I chose an image from the woodcut book "The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel" from the 16th century, because I loved the artwork and felt that it would fit the overall goal to create a modernized classical book. I placed the synopsis in the back cover and embellished it with a frame border using Sabon's ampersand symbol, and the tilde character to elicit the satirical given similarly by the front cover image. The text in the green background is gold to help the words pop out in contrast.