Assignment 5: Visual Book
In class, we watched a TED Talk by Chip Kidd, who talked about “giving form to content” as a book designer. He talked about considering both the content and the style of the content when attempting to create an image that matches the story. I particularly liked his “Dry” book cover, which he had designed to look like it was dripping with water, to convey the story of an alcoholic who was in denial. He definitely had a sense of creativity that I aspire to reach someday. All of his designs clearly had a lot of thought put into them in terms of how they could relate to the story they matched.
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I initially had a bunch of ideas for the topic of my book, but I think I want to pursue my idea of illustrating a poem. I think this will be a lot of fun because I have a lot of freedom in terms of colors and expressions, and I see a lot of potential to really make the words come to life.
For the design, my primary inspiration is water color paint because I think it is light-hearted and free, but still very expressive. In addition, I think it’s something that will really challenge me to play more with unique shapes and textures in illustrator. Here are some pictures that match the aesthetic I want to go for:


I also take a lot of inspiration from @bymariandrew on instagram, whose art I really enjoy looking at because of its simplicity and authenticity:




Throughout these inspiration pictures, the themes definitely include vibrant colors and organic shapes, all of which will be really interesting to try and recreate with illustrator.
I’m looking forward to getting started working with these new textures and shapes and improving my design skills!
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After the inDesign tutorial in class, I was able to make this page:

This isn’t what I would want my title page to look at but it was just good to have some experience making different shapes and text in inDesign.
I also put an image in a pen tool image:

Although I wasn’t quite ready to make a mockup of my book, particularly because of the highly custom-illustrated and free format of my book, I was able to familiarize myself with the tools in inDesign, which will be helpful with the rest of my project.
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Today I talked to Sanika and she told me about another artist called Oliver Jeffers who makes art similar to the aesthetic I want to go for. Here are some images from him that I liked:
We also talked about playing with multimedia — maybe I can splatter some paint or experiment with some rips after I print my book. I think this would also help to give more of an authentic feeling.
I did some research and was able to find this article about putting water color textures in illustrator:
This will be very helpful for me throughout my design process! This weekend, I am hoping to start playing with some water color textures, as well as finalize the poetry for my book.
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I had some watercolor paints at home, but I only had printer paper and no brush. Using my pinky, some printer paper, and a scanner, I was able to make this:

I wasn’t happy with this because the paper got all crinkled, which showed in the scan. So after class, I went to the art store and picked up some watercolor paper and brushes, and I was able to scan this into a png:

This looks a lot better and useable. I experimented with some flicks and different paint saturations, but I would like to make more with overlapping colors because it will give my book a more dynamic feel.
I’ve also finalized the text and laid it out by page in inDesign, and I started designing in illustrator. For the first page, I want to have an image of someone calmly thinking, and so far I made this with the pen tool:

This looks fine but it’s not highly unique or stylized, like I had been talking about wanting to focus on in this assignment.
Looking for more inspiration online, I found the following images:


Using these as inspiration, I made this more stylized character:

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Today I met with Nandini and she recommended that I think about a few things:
- Typography: how much of a focus do I want to put on the typography? For example, in the tutorial I linked above, typography was the whole composition. I could do this too, using the poem as my type and designing really unique typography for each line.
- Size: exactly how large do I want the book to be? I was thinking pocket-book size, but she recommended that I physically take a piece of paper and create a prototype by folding it down to figure out the exact dimensions.
- Watercolor expression: can the water colors tell a story in themselves? For example, they start apart and then come together, or maybe the color scheme changes throughout the book? How can the water color media be significant to the story?
Continuing with my watercolor exploration, I was able to edit my scans in photoshop to increase the brightness and saturation, and then input them to illustrator. I vectorized the image, and then I used the lasso tool to select each paint blob and move it to a new layer.

I also applied the feather effect and set 80% opacity, so I had something like this:

Then I overlapped some of the water colors, made a pattern, created a graphic style from that, and applied it to my text:


I actually quite like the way this is coming out! I like the look of the water color with the font a lot — this is a font I quickly downloaded from DaFont. After looking at this, I really want to make sure to include typography in my book.
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After experimenting with a lot of different text, some hand-sketches, and etc. I decided to pivot a little bit to include some haikus in my book, since i think it will give me the best variety and I will have the most fun designing pages when each one can be centered on a different poem, rather than having a flowing narrative like I had originally planned. I compiled some of my favorite haikus and started working with the watercolor graphic styles I had developed.
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In preparation for the critique on 21 November, I made each spread a different style I had been experimenting with. I’m hoping to get some feedback on each style so I can pursue one of them.






I’m looking forward to receiving some feedback in the interim crit that I can use to pick a style and further refine my book!
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I got a lot of helpful feedback during the critique. Overall, people very much preferred my simpler designs to the complex — spreads 1, 4, and 5 were the favorites. So moving forward, I’m going to try to continue to make my designs as simple as possible.
Someone pointed out that my patterns look kind of like Emilio Pucci:


Yep, I see it! In general, people said that they really liked my patterns and would like to see me play with showcasing them more. Someone suggested that I could do more with the geometric designs I played with on my last spread, doing something like this:


Obviously nothing this busy, but the ideas of lines and circles as basic shapes to incorporate my watercolor prints into.
In terms of constructive feedback, people thought that the third spread was very hard to read (I agree), and in general didn’t like the script font I was playing with. Also, they weren’t a big fan of the watercolor outlined in black — they suggested that I either stick with outlines or with the color. Also, someone suggested that I play with the composition of the drawing on the fourth spread to make it look more delicate and sparse.
Someone also recommended de-vectorizing my patterns to keep more of the authentic texture of watercolor. This is tricky because I want to have the watercolors as graphic styles so I can apply them to all kinds of different shapes, rather than having them as images that I manually underlay. In addition, because I only painted one splotch of watercolor at a time, they only flow as patterns because I used the pattern tool in Illustrator. I think that going in and manually copying and pasting images of different swatches would be much less efficient and probably would not give me the consistent pattern I’m looking for.
Like I said earlier, I had made each spread in a different style deliberately to see which style people would prefer and then pick just one of them. However, some people actually said that they liked all the different styles because it added variety. It’s true that if I just picked the first spread as my style, I think the book would be a little monotonous — so, it’s up to me to come up with how to make it coherent but still keep interest throughout the book.
Overall, I think the interim crit was very helpful to provide some direction for me. Based off the feedback I received, I’m going to keep going along the route of my last spread with the geometric designs, but also attempt to keep lots of variety throughout the book. I will also experiment with de-vectorizing the patterns to see how different it might look.
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For my next iteration, I explored the geometric designs much further. I spent a lot of time looking at the composition of each page, using only basic geometric shapes like circles, squares, and perfect triangles. In addition, I made the front and back covers cut-outs to provide a sneak peek of the book. Here’s what I came up with:









When I showed this to Nandini, she challenged me to be more thoughtful about the colors and shapes incorporated as they relate to each poem, and how those colors and shapes can enhance the poetry, rather than being simply an accessory. In addition, she pointed out a few things I was still missing, like a title and author credits. Finally, in terms of the geometric composition, she pointed out that most of the pages looked kind of forced in comparison to the organic, nature-y feel of haiku poetry. She recommended that I come up with some more “natural” compositions, which would better convey the simplicity and organic nature of haiku poetry.
For my final iteration, I put in a lot of time and thought to create some new patterns that would better convey the imagery of the poem, and my geometric compositions also do a much better job of matching the poetry I was illustrating. I’ve put a rationale of my design choices in the captions of each spread:









I printed the final book with cardstock, using an Xacto knife to create the triangle cutouts. I saddle-bound it with two staples and voila! Here was the final product:









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I think there was a major improvement throughout my journey in this design process. My final product is definitely much more thoughtfully designed, as well as more aesthetically pleasing, than the initial ideas I had. Even though the project ended up taking a slightly different direction than I had initially expected to take, I learned a lot about technical Adobe skills — such as incorporating multimedia (in this case, the watercolor swatches), creating patterns, and working with graphic styles. I also see artistic growth, as I gradually moved from developing a product that looked okay and didn’t mean much, to a set of compositions that had a lot of consideration behind them and thought put into why I would lay them out as I did.
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In wrapping up this project, I just took a moment to look back at some of the first Gestalt designs I made for this class:

Comparing this to the geometric designs I created now, I can see a great deal of artistic and technical growth; my most recent designs look much more creative and original, and more aesthetically pleasing overall. I’m very grateful that this course was able to push me to be a better creator, and I just want to say thanks so much for the opportunity and the guidance which helped me to grow!
