An explanation of my design choices

Choice of text

Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting is culturally rich and hones in on a specific setting in recent history (Leith in the late 1980s). The story focuses on the trials and misadventures of a group of young characters in their mid–twenties, with poverty, drugs, and violence featuring heavily. While the novel’s black humour and colourful language could be written off as crude, this would diminish the novel’s ability to hold up a mirror to the cultural context of its setting. Its format is also stylistically unusual in that chapters adopt different tones and visual styles depending on the narrator. Just as the novel plays with format to flesh out its characters and their relationships, I have tried to implement a similar philosophy with my typesetting decisions.

The scene I have selected is the beginning of a chapter (’House Arrest’), where the main protagonist Renton wakes up in his childhood bedroom following a heroin overdose. While his downtrodden mother, still grieving the death of another son, is determined to help Renton through a cold turkey recovery, Renton tries to cajole her into giving him access to other drugs to get through it. The two characters are worlds away from each other; Renton is unreachable in his desperation for more drugs and his aloofness to regular society, while his mother’s steely–eyed assertion that they will get through this together does not seem to quite ring true for either of them.

Font-stack

The Sunday Times’ description of the novel as “the voice of punk, grown up, grown wiser and grown eloquent’ echoes Trainspotting’s counterculture feel. In a setting where the Sex Pistols and the punk movement were still culturally present, the novel’s gratuitous use of profanity and dark themes keeps this aesthetic in mind. As such, I would like to use typefaces often associated with rebellion and ‘fighting the system.’

I intend to use a stencil typeface for headings. Reminiscent of graffiti, the Google font Allerta Stencil looks just as much at home sprayed on a wall as it does on gritty band and movie posters. As a side note, it is an interesting coincidence that the novel’s release coincides with the time UK-based graffiti artist Banksy became more widely known for his stencil work.

I plan to use a monospace font for body text. Similar to typefaces used in film scripts, monospace fonts are evenly spaced, and not necessarily the most exciting. However, as the majority of the excerpt is written in Scots with phonetic spelling, the words may be unfamiliar to most readers, as well as daunting on the page. For this reason, an easily readable, accessible font such as the Google font Inconsolata can help readers pick out these new words and phrases, regardless of screen size. Its relative simplicity also ‘rebels’ agains more florid styles, keeping with the novel’s themes.

While the book may be dismissed as mere titillation and written purely for shock factor, it is worth noting that it is increasingly becoming part of higher education curriculums. For the first letter of the chapter, I intend to use drop caps as a reminder that Trainspotting should indeed be considered literature, and just as deserving of artistic flourish in its lettering as any traditional printed work by Dickens.

Colour

Headers are coloured a vibrant, almost red shade of orange (#f75a00). Orange is often associated with creativity and outside of the box thinking. In the novel, it is a recurring theme that Renton chooses “not to choose life”, or a conventional lifestyle. Here, this shade of orange represents the theme of ‘going against the grain.’ Its almost red hues also remind us of the danger of Renton and his cronies’ lifestyle, with death, disease, and criminal charges an everyday threat.

A fainter shade of orange will be used in Renton’s dialogue sections, to further represent his last weak attempt to ‘rebel’ against his mother’s wishes by wheedling her for a visit to the clinic.

Renton’s mother’s dialogue boxes will be in a light shade of grey. Grey drudgery represents her attempt to soldier on and trying to power through yet more familial hardship.

These dialogue boxes’ colours will be quite light and faint, both to help user readability and also to symbolise that both characters are weak, and fighting losing battles.

Layout

The chapter begins in a fairly linear fashion, with a centre-aligned header, left-aligned text, and a neatly bordered backdrop.

However, as we read further, this begins to break down. The layout itself, with its juxtaposition of linear left-aligned text and speech boxes, begins to eschew the convention of typical prose. This echoes Renton’s reluctance to return to social norms in the passage, and his hope to continue on his drug-addled path.