Assignment 5: Visual Book

Emma Wenger
Nov 1 · 12 min read

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.

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:

On this image, I really like the vibrant water color background combined with the detailed figure in the foreground

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

The art has a very homemade, raw feeling, which makes me feel like the artist is being authentic in her work

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!

After the inDesign tutorial in class, I was able to make this page:

Although it’s kind of ugly, I was able to play with different color, text, and shapes on InDesign

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:

Again, this isn’t a useful design element to use, but it’s good for getting experience with making custom shapes and adding/manipulating images inside the shapes

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.

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:

On this one, I really like how the background has the quality of watercolor with the different levels of saturation, but it’s very subtle
Here are some figures from his artwork — I like how he has a very distinct style, and I think this project will be a great opportunity to start establishing my own style as well — even the stars, although they’re a standard shape, have a very distinct stylization that make them his own — this is my goal for my own style as well

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.

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:

Today I met with Nandini and she recommended that I think about a few things:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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.

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.

cover page
This style is simple and elegant, including simply a swatch of watercolor that matches the mood of the haiku (in this case, I picked a blue-based pattern I had painted, because it looked like dew, and the red conveying the “world of struggle”), and then the haiku in simple Helvetica font. This gives a very clean, poetry-focused look to the design.
In this one, I decided to stylize the poem itself, and also the watercolor pattern is more rhythmic than the others. The bright colors match the haiku’s theme and are evocative of blooming flowers, and the text is the same one I had been experimenting with before from DaFont, which I then converted to an outline and added the black graphite texture to the edges of. I like the look of this, but am worried that the font takes away from the simplicity of haiku poetry.
In this style, I tried to go all out with making the text very large and the watercolor as the whole spread. While it’s an interesting idea, I think this takes away from haikus’ focus on simplicity. For that reason, I’m not sure this is the best style, but I’m including it in the critique, hoping there might be some good components of it that I can incorporate into my final design.
I will say this is my favorite so far, because I really like how the illustration came out. I think it frames the poem quite nicely while still maintaining a level of simplicity. I experimented with filling in different parts of the illustration in different ways, so am looking forward to getting some feedback on the choice I settled on.
This design is the most similar to the first one, but I tried to incorporate a little more interest as well. It definitely maintains the simplicity but with a little added interest, so I’m looking forward to hearing peoples’ opinions on this one vs the first one.

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!

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.

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 made a new pattern for this one to have the colors I wanted — it was really important for me to add some red because yes — poppies are red! I also added some fresh green to match the feeling of bright, blooming spring grass. Finally, I added some blue to add a touch of vivid spring skies. As for the geometric composition, I wanted to stay with standard geometric shapes, which is why I picked the circle, as the closest thing to a budding poppy. I made them different sizes to depict different phases of a blooming flower — starting as a small, tight bud and growing to a full flower (counterclockwise to draw the viewer’s eye around in an interesting shape around the page).
For this one, I went with a darker blue color scheme to match a “spring twilight” but made sure to include the light orange to mimic the light of a candle. In terms of the geometric composition, I decided to go with triangles because they look like arrows that signify movement. So, in the poem, how it says the light is “transferred” — the outward arrows represent the orange light moving outward in all directions in the spring twilight. A nice bonus of this particular arrangement is the nice Gestalt closure that is going on with the center triangle — due to the placement of the other 3 triangles, the viewer is first drawn to see the white triangle outline around the center triangle, really drawing attention to this idea of “transfer” from the poetry.
For the color scheme of this one, I decided to play off the dew with a medium-tone green representing a dewey condensation, accompanied by the deep blue for water, and a yellow to look like shining water droplet reflections. I also tried to make the pattern look more complex and varied, to connote the struggle within each dewdrop — the colors are struggling against each other in a sense. For the shape, I stuck with a simple circle, which looks like a simplified droplet of water that might have fallen onto the page. The consistent rows are meant to provide rhythm and structure for the viewer.
For this composition, I wanted the watercolor pattern to connote the crowd of people with an apparition among them. The apparition is represented by the abstract orange figure that appears in each of the “crowds.” In addition, I included almost all the swatches available in this pattern to create a lot of unique tones, representing a busy crowd of all kinds of different people. I emphasized the blue and the green to convey a subtly cool, “wet” feeling. In terms of the geometric composition, I chose squares rotating around a circle to hopefully create a distinct line for the viewer to follow with their eyes (clockwise along the bottom edges of the squares), which gives the feeling of a moving, shuffling crowd.
For this one, I was thinking specifically of the first line — “life’s little, our heads sad.” If I had to pick an image to represent this line, I would draw someone with a little raincloud over their head — when we are sad and feel small, our thoughts are dark and our minds don’t work clearly. So, I picked a color scheme that was meant to convey a dreamy but deep water. The dark blue does a nice job of this, and the lighter blue and green add to the depth of the water. I chose circles for the geometric shape and arranged them in a way that somewhat reminded me of a cloud, without being too explicit about it so that it could still be up to the interpretation of the viewer.

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:

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.

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!

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