Grid, Style, and Format
Final Design
Print 2018 Individual Project
About the Project
For this project, we were to create a bound book of content that we created. We were to incorporate all the communication design concepts that we learned to form the book directly around our content. The aim of this project was to explore visual and verbal interaction and exemplify our ability to combine the two.
Process
Choosing the Content
For the content of my book, I wanted to use the food photographs that I have been taking, editing, and uploading throughout the past year. I use a photo editing and sharing app called VSCO.
I had a lot of content and food images to choose from, so the main consideration that I had when thinking about the book design was how I should organize the content.
Some of my ideas included: a food and travel diary, a food/restaurant review guide, a food tour by city, a comparison of the same foods at different cities and restaurants.
Ultimately, I decided to make a food diary of 2018, organized chronologically by month. I tried to keep the text very brief, summarizing briefly where I traveled to each month.
My initial digital iterations were done on half-letter sized paper. In these stages, I experimented with different grid layouts. I also played around with typefaces and establishing hierarchy in the text.
Interim Critique
I showed these mockups during the interim critique. Some of the most notable comments were regarding the somewhat awkward white space in some of the images, as well as comments suggesting different typefaces be used. I also had people encourage me to write more in-depth about the food and my personal experience with it.
Digital Iterations
I decided to switch the size of my book to be a square because it gave me more room to explore different grid layouts. I also felt like a square was more fitting for a photo book.
I selected the content that I wanted to include for each page, then tried to design a grid layout that was unique to those images. After creating the layout of the photos, I would then go back and fit the text into the page. Each page was a new challenge, almost like a puzzle, where I had to think about the best way that the photos could be displayed.
I bound my book with a Two-Saddle Stitch using a needle and thread. I felt that this would be the best way to bind it because it would allow the book to be opened flat so that the entire spread could be seen.
Final Product
Conclusion
If I were to redo this project, I would use a photo printer to print my book, because the printer that I used dulled the images a bit. However, I am quite satisfied with the final product and had a lot of fun designing each page. This was definitely my favorite project of the ones that we worked on throughout this course. I especially liked this project because this book is so personal to me and it felt really satisfying at the end, to hold a finished product that I designed, cut, and bound myself.
