sabrina dallot-seguro

I love Monocle. There, I’ve said it. Even if it produces statements like 

“For sure there’s many a pup living in Tokyo’s Jiyugaoka district with a far bigger wardrobe than your average child in Chelsea.” i53p38

I’ll forgive them, because I’m just so easily aesthetically pleased. So shoot me (and then check out @ohmonocle on Twitter, and have a good giggle).

The set of images I shot in Paris (of the rare book dealers - see below) seemed like the perfect collection to try out in a Monocle-style layout. I had lots of them, and I already knew they worked well next to each other. What I didn’t realise, what quite how clever the Monocle designers were.  

 It was a whole different game to my previous DPS. It was at least 24 solid hours (and countless litres of tea) just picking fonts and trying to align page numbers with subtitles - and I still want to do this for a living? 

I really wanted a clean-looking page, which I tried to achieve by using blocks of white and black text. My text actually printed much larger than I was envisaging, which I was really disappointed with. Look at it now, I’m not sure the font I chose for my captions worked as well as I had hoped it would with the font I used for my main body of text.

I’m really glad I chose to mimic this style. however, as it required so many different techniques, that I learnt a lot about the design process and combining Adobe applications for optimum results. I’m definitely going to continue trying out  further layouts in this style, until I’m really happy with the results I can achieve. 

I’d spent time with the ladies at the W.I. in Falmouth and really enjoyed their vivacity, inspiring stories, but most of all their cake. Sofia Coppola’s (ridiculously anachronistic) version of Marie Antoinette sprang immediately to mind. I desperately wanted to mimic her film poster with an image I had taken of a sprawling tea table full of cakes piled high with icing.  

I realised very quickly that I wouldn’t be able to do so exactly, but I took elements from it (the cut out writing to create a quote layered on the image as well as using the famous ‘quote’ “Let them eat cake” as the title for my piece). 

I found Indesign near to impossible to master, and eventually worked using a combination of Ilustrator, Photoshop and Indesign to create my final layout, which I think worked well as a combined process. 

In my excitement, I didn’t include captions. Oops. Next one!  

And so, along with the start of a great module (Narrative & Storytelling: News, Editorial and Documentary) came the birth of some truly obscure obsessions. A brand new taste for negative space, font names and and above all, an incessant desire to realise my visual identity. 

Photojournalism (away from other forms of Photography), makes it difficult to obtain (and moreover, maintain) a signature style. The photojournalist should be invisible, blending into every background - unnoticed, while still very present, and so recording an ever-changing foreground, perhaps requires an  adaptable style. 

Synonymity, however, can be created in the presentation of Documentary Photography. Magnum Photographer, Jim Goldberg (see image below), is a prime example of this in the way he uses his exhibition spaces. 

This module asked for two, double page spread magazine layouts to display picture stories, using Indesign. And for the first time, we became editor, picture editor, journalist, art director and designer, as well as the photographer. (Dream job in one!)