Project 5: A book
Print
November 8 — December 8, 2016
Individual Project
About the Project
This project is the fifth one for the Communication Deign Fundamentals class, Fall 2016. We chose a piece of our own and create a bound book for it, including both text and imagery. Images should be ideally our own and can be photographs, illustration, graphic content or abstract. In this project we were expected to incorporate our knowledge of typography and grid systems, and make appropriate design decisions based on the content. The form this book takes should be directly informed by the content. For instance, a book of hipster design trends would feel disjointed if it were conventionally gridded and set in Garamond.
Initial Ideation and Content Developing
My inspiration of this book came from a picture I saw a while ago about the texture of a piece of steak. My initial idea was to make a photo book about the texture of meat. I then realized just having pictures of actual meat may be kind of dull and I decided to also include “human meat” — nude portraits. I spent about four weeks to take pictures of a variety of meat: steak, pork, fish and so on and pictures of nude portrait.
I took around a hundred photographs of meat and human body in total initially. I spent a lot of time picking out the better ones and photoshopping them. To make all the portrait photos consistent over the piece, I decided to only use photos of a single female model.
Fitst Iteration
In this stage, I mainly focused on the composition of the spreads and how to make pictures of meat and human body go together well. I very soon realized it was very hard to make these two types of photographs work well together as the meat photos are very colorful and vibrant while all the portraits are black and white. Additionally, it was very hard to find an overall topic that ties these photos together into an integrated piece.
Second Iteration
Having the problems mentioned above, I decided to abandon the meat pictures and instead do a photo book for just the nude portrait. I also found a topic that would suit the graphics well: Original Simplicity. I gathered a few poems by Pablo Saborio about Nihilism. They talked about what people would have left without all the material that we own. This topic matches with the pictures pretty well as they are about the simplistic beauty of human parts without any unnecessary decoration.
As I have pictures across the entire spread for some of my spreads, I used a binding technique called French Binding so that the picture would be continuous across both of the pages uninterrupted.
