CDF Project 5: Visual Book
Objective: Create a 12–16 page book (the exact dimensions are your choice), printed and bound, with care given to every element including text, illustration, paper type, and binding.
For this project, I decided to create a book about one of my former favorite foods — pizza. Growing up my appreciation for pizza stemmed from having pizza at every memorable celebration or notably large event. But only later did I learn that pizza was a lot more than just the stereotypical delivery slice.
In lieu of this, I created my book to inform people as to the most common types of pizza around the world, and provide tidbits of the unique characteristics of each slice.
The five slices I chose to make 2-page spreads of are
- the Neapolitan pizza
- the New York slice
- the Sicilian slice
- the Deep Dish pie
- the Detroit slice
Initial Sketches
My initial ideas revolved around actually describing each slice in very vivid details. Things I would include are as follows:
- the rundown: some basics about the pizza’s origins, what it’s known as now
- what makes a good slice of the pizza covered
- why people think a particular style of pizza is superior
Some quick sketches of a couple spreads I had are as follows (just a basic map + spreads of large text):
Considering these pages are not very large, one thing I wanted to do was limit the amount of negative space, so that I could condense my book into that size.
Digital Iterations
Originally, I figured that I couldn’t source enough images of the pizza I wanted to describe, so I wanted to create illustrations of the slices I couldn’t get. Thus, rather than my original intentions of creating a guidebook, I pivoted slightly here. Below are two spreads I created while trying to narrow down the visual contents of my books.
Interim Critiques
From the above spreads, I received a solid amount of critical feedback. Most notably, the majority of the class mentioned one of these three things as critical feedback to my two possible spreads at the time:
- there’s WAY too much text per page
- illustrations of maps and slice seem too cartoonish for a “guide book”; the Neapolitan pizza clearly looks more appetizing than deep dish slice
- titles are fairly distracting; the way elements are laid out make it hard for the reader to determine hierarchy
- having the elements as I arranged them seemed too repetitive to the viewer and the relationship between left and right spreads were not cohesive
Additionally, I was recommended to try making my book portrait-oriented if I wanted it to be a guide book, as many landscape-oriented books are either children’s books or books with many images.
Further Iterations + Desk Critiques
I was still convinced that the general layout of having a map on the left page and text + imagery on the right side was appropriate for my use case. However, I had to go back to the drawing board with regards to my overloaded text. I knew that I wanted to incorporate block quotes to an extent, as they are visually appealing and create a more distinct hierarchical viewing for the reader. Another thing is that much of the unnecessary repetition of elements in my work needed to be fixed.
Sometime about halfway between interim critiques and final critiques, I realized that I could feasibly source all of my imagery with pizzerias around Pittsburgh. This made it a lot easier to iterate my previous work into something that looked more like a guide book.
For reference, the pizza places I went to were:
- Mercurio’s, Shadyside (Neapolitan)
- La Felice Pizzeria, Squirrel Hill (New York)
- Mineo’s Pizza, Squirell Hill (Sicilian)
- Uno’s Pizzeria, Waterfront (Deep Dish)
- Iron Born, Strip District (Detroit)
An example of a spread I caem up with after committing to using images is below:
After a further series of more informal desk critiques, I agreed that there were still some layout issues now that I’d committed to having smaller amounts of text in larger fonts, and blocked out into various quotes and snippets in order to allow the reader to more freely appreciate the imagery. For starters, the left spread almost looks like a menu; while this was a coincidence with the contents of my quotes, I figured that I had to break part of the grid structure that I’d enforced with some of the lines separating quotes. Additionally, the border around the right spread seemed unnecessary, and I was sure to consider removing that.
In keeping with less text, I played with grid structures a bit more in my spreads in order to increase variance while reading my book. A couple further iterations included my Detroit slice spread and Sicilian style spread, as seen below:
Detroit and Sicilian-style pizzas are notoriously rectangular, and so placing images similar to the Neapolitan spread above would have reinforced the grid structure that my block quotes created. As a result, I played with taking pictures at different angles and having my images borders deviate from the grid structure (as on the right). After toying with the other spreads until final critiques, I settled on the following:
Final Piece
Reflection
Overall, I found this project to be incredibly challenging because all of a sudden, almost all restrictions in terms of design decisions were lifted, and we were essentially given a blank canvas to explore. Not only could our book topics be incredibly open-ended, but the mediums we were able to use expanded beyond the Illustrator pen and shape tools.
Once I had some time to solidify the actual contents of my book and incorporate peer feedback, the progress I made began to take better shape. With more time, I’d definitely play with typeface more, as there were significantly fewer restrictions this time around. Perhaps more usage of sans-serif fonts could add a visual contrast that may be lacking in some places of my book.
Although not as relevant, I’d probably also space out the intervals in which I ate pizza while getting images for my book. Nonetheless, it’s safe to say I won’t be eating pizza again anytime soon.