Merging Design and Poetry

Each year there is a challenge put out to undergo writing one poem everyday during the month of April. I wrote about 25 as I write this article now in November. At first I stuck pretty close to my goal of one a day. That that did work well for some poems. What I found was that most needed to be re-written for them to work. Some re-writes spaced a part by several months. If I get too familiar with them it can at times hinder the writing process and need to see it again from fresh eyes.

Starting this I wasn't sure where it would go but it wasn't long before I saw that the second half of this site, the part that really focused on education, I felt blended well with the writings on school. It was in such a way that if I put too much of that at the beginning would have interrupted the flow of the articles. Some of those writings were originally constructed as being pieces that were five pages of solid text in a word processor before being expanded to about seven or eight pages. They really need to be read in long form like chapters in a book.

But the second half? It is so different. More more teen/tween minded and mostly one page articles that stand on their own. Less depth and I hope no less profound. The poems just fit better in that context. As I finish out these 30+ poems I am excited to see what they bring to the back-end. This goes for both in terms of words and how their narrow lines of text allow for variety in layout.

This week I started really fleshing out several poems on the August page. The look of it really keeps playing up the inky theme both in terms of the hand-drawn typography and the splatter visual style on top of the warm background. When I started this in April I had no idea that they would bring so much life to this work that I was already happy with!