It's the Bombe

 Cryptography! Or as my great-grandpa used to call it, fubswrjudskb!

This has been an ongoing project for my layout design class, and it's finally getting to a point where I'm ready to call it presentable. The project is to construct a tritone newsletter for a non-profit organization. While my classmates are off raising awareness for worth-while organizations like the WWF or GlobalH2O, I decided that I like word puzzles and made a newsletter for non-profit hobby organization the American Cryptogram Association.

The neat thing about making a newsletter for a group dedicated to hiding messages in things is that you get to hide a bunch of messages in things. Take this logo, for example.

This logo is a rotational cipher for the word BOMBE, which is a reference to the machines used to crack the Nazi ENIGMA codes during World War II. If you take 360 degrees and divide it by 26 (letters of the alphabet), you can assign a different letter to each distinct point on a circle. I indicated this by the point on the circle that doesn't have a triangle on it. The outer ring is B, the next ring is O, and so on. The result is a neat little explosion with a neat little hidden message.

This is the cover! The main focus here is the tritone coloring - only the colors used in the entire document are the red, orange, and blue shades along the left edge. The dark brown is a combination of all of these colors, and the raindrop imagery is just lighter and lighter shades of blue. In theory, this entire newsletter could be printed with just three inks.

And here's the interior spread! It's very busy, very rigid, and very wordy, just like cryptography. Because this composition is for a hobby organization, I wanted to include articles and information that would be interesting to casual cryptographers. This is a bit of a departure from the philosophy of the ACA, but its accessibility is perfect for bringing in new members and keeping current members informed and entertained.