by Shane Frohnapfel

The story of La Coquetterie’s masthead. I chose to follow modern youthful fashion because I believe how people dress expresses a lot about them, whether they admit it or not. As a designer, being able to clearly express yourself is key to doing the task at hand the “right” way. I also believe it’s important for a designer to look at the world around them for inspiration. I don’t think we can survive in an introverted vacuum, we need to look out on other things and draw from them. While viewing the world we can see it is constantly changing, now more than ever. The arts in this world record and document times and places just like any essay could. There is just a lot people can say with fashion and about fashion, and what better than a magazine with substance to chronicle the way things look in the here and now?

Specifically, I’m choosing higher end ready to wear and street wear fashions to follow in this magazine. I also want to show how various styles influence other styles. This idea shows through the title “La Coquetterie”, a french word meaning “The French

high class” that came around in the early 20th Century. While this is an English based magazine, it shows how the things we wear have become international. We are a people who need to think globally.

Of the four design types, being vernacular inspired, hand drawn/calligraphy,v constructions, and modify existing type, I gravitated to the hand drawn and modified existing type, being that the vernacular and constructions would take away from the higher class feel I am trying to reach with the magazine. I began first with hand drawn letter forms, starting off with straight letters, and then gravitating to a graffiti style, and then almost to human-ized Bodoni look. The more I did with the Bodoni look, the more I realized there’s already been so much done with this style of type in fashion, and decided to abandon it when I got to the computer to modify existing type. The final thing I did with hand drawn design was experiment with rhythm of the letters, because fashion is something you can count on, season after season, so you should expect that, letter after letter.

The typeface I chose to modify is Futura, because it is so dis-tinctly itself, and adding flairs to it would still let the typeface be itself, but it would take on new meaning. I also chose to experi-ment with different weights of Futura, to help get away from the universal thin “Calvin Klein” look, but also to set up dominance in the name. As well, this is a metaphor for clothes themselves, as certain clothes have certain meanings until you mix them with other items, and then they become a brand new thing.

I decided to take things from the hand drawn and re apply them to the modified typeface, because I feel like I learned a lot about what I want the magazine to be. I played a lot with interlocking letters to play on today’s monogram obsession (Chanel, Fendi, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc) as well as a way to express unisexual-ity, or at least the idea of a magazine that allows both sexes to be of a dominant role. In the end that didn’t work out like the way I thought it would, and chose to ditch the idea. The idea came back with the extensions of ascenders and descenders, to imply unisexuality and a customized look. Later, I decided to play with baselines of letters based on ascenders, descenders,

and the large “C”, creating a step pattern, to subtly imply the “high” class, as well as ease the pronunciation (a French title for an English magazine intended for American audience may be a little deep). After experimenting with several weights, including obliques, I found something that fit my vision of “La Coquetterie” perfectly.