Project 5: Grids, Style & Format
Project Description
For our final project, we had to create a bound book on a topic of our choice. Using principles we had learnt throughout the semester such as typogrpahy, illustrative style, hierarchy and grids, we had to design a minimum of 16 pages about our topic, including text and images. I was working on project for another class where I was building a simple walking robot. I decided to base my book on this project and how I went about making it.
Process
Initial Sketches and Inspiration
I started off by looking for inspiration on pinterest. There were so many good examples, and I got a little confused initially, but I settled on the three below as my main inspiration. I really liked how they used the grid and were very minimilist.
I sketched out rough ideas of what I wanted the layout to be. I tried to mainly avoid making the spreads similar to each other and have everything be very minimilistic. (include sketch pictures)
First Iteration
I divided the contents of the book into 7 different sections:
- introduction
- research
- mechanics
- electronics
- code
- assembly
- conclusions
Since I was making the robot at the same time as this book, I did not have a lot of the content in place, so I substituted the images I would potentially use as boxes. This was a little confusing to work with since I couldn’t really picture all the colours and how the images would affect the layout.
But once I started putting in pictures, I found that the colours from the pictures were very distracting so I decided to switch to black and white images. To make them a little more subdued, I reduced their opacity to 75% of the original. I decided to bring in one spot colour to highlight things in the spreads.
I initially struggled with sticking to the grid and making sure pages didn’t seem to similar. It was also really difficult to make a layout for the code, and format the copy well enough that it was still understandable and not in big chunks.
For the font, I really wanted a simple typeface that had a lot of fonts. I settled on Roboto and I really liked it and thought it worked well with the theme of the book.
Feedback from interim crit: large blocks of text seem intimidating; more consistency in the amount of content in each page; good typeface choice; a more strict grid.
Second Iteration
When I printed this out for final crit, the pink was very dull and didn’t break the grayscale of the spreads. This was really disappointing and I definitely had to change it to a much brighter colour. Apart from that, the other critique I got was about the ordering of the chunks of code.
Final Iteration
I changed the colour to orange, which definitely printed better and stood out more. Apart from that, I really didn’t like my cover so I redid that and spaced out a few elements more.
Final Thoughts
I probably should have picked another topic. I did not have a lot of the content while developing this book which made it really hard and I was unable to give as much time to taking good photos as I would have liked. In addition, I didn’t really like the modular grid and I wished I had explored the other kinds of grid systems.