More Ideas for 'Riverside Living'

These are two concepts I've been working on for this extract. The first one focuses on the feeling of insignificance the voice of the poem feels when watching the water. I chose to isolate the last line to suggest a sense of loneliness. I also opened up the kerning as the words progress to suggest that this feeling is increasing throughout the poem. I tried to incorperate a visual that suggests a water ripple. This was an attempt to reflect the continual flow of the water to the audience. But after several tries it seemed the two concepts didn't really gel.

The second design focuses on the "continual flow" mentioned in the poem. The idea was to connect the words in a way that makes them visually flow from one to the other. I chose Gill Sans for the typeface as san serifs work well with this sort of composition. When arranged in this way their simplicity allows the letters to lead on to each other seamlessly. Also Gill Sans is closely reminiscent of typefaces used in signs and advertising around London, such as Johnston for the underground. So it ties in nicely with the idea of London and the Thames. 

The problem, however, with the original layout is that it was laid out with two words per line in some cases which caused words like "helps" to lead to "makes". This means that when the audience reads the poem down the page they naturally skip some of the words because of the way they're linked. The screenshot above is a development on that idea. I arranged the poem to have one word per line and also, instead of forcing them to join in ways that don't always look right, made them sit very close to each other but still clearly leading off from the word above. For example there is a clear line leading from "make" to "just" where the k,m,l and j meet.

I like the result of this idea. The connection between the words reflects the continual flow of the river and I was able to adjust the size of the words at the end of the poem to emphasize the fact that they know so 'little'. The decreasing size of the type also reflects the feeling of insignificance as it suggests the voice of the poem feels small in comparison to the endless flowing water. This design still needs quite a bit of development though. The colour isn't particularly appealing and the scale of the poem overall could be altered to better fit the frame. I think the basic structure is fine though.