I reckon it’s Layout Week here at the Gleeson Bloglomerate. On Monday I showed you my layout for the Fertility Wizard animated spot, and here is where I am with my “Dürer’s Alphabet” layout.
I’ve been teasing you a bit with my Dürer’s Alphabet project. I already scanned in his 1535 book (or at least the 1917 English translation of it), but now I’m making a gorgeous website based on that book. I mean, it will be gorgeous when I’m done. This layout kind of gets at what I’m trying to accomplish.
See, I had a couple of goals in mind from the start:
- I want all of the graphics to consist of Dürer’s own art, most especially engravings or woodcuts. Nothing by any other artist, not even myself.
- I want a tall, narrow archway on the left, for navigational links, and a wide, round archway on the right, for the main content.
I thought that with such a prolific draftsman as Dürer, I should have no trouble finding an engraving with a couple of arches that fit my needs perfectly. But alas, trouble is what I’ve had. I’ve found nothing that fits.
I actually cobbled the layout above out of two separate engravings, one arch from this illustration and the other from this one. They don’t quite fit right together, but it’s as good as I’ve got so far.
What I really need is a good scan of the Triumphal Arch. There’s so much stuff in that, that I know I could piece together the right layout from its elements, and they would work together well. But I don’t have a print of the Triumphal Arch to scan. Still looking.