Final Project: Designing a Book
Communication Design Fundamentals
Project info: Book/Illustration., Individual project, 2017.
Project description: The purpose of the project was to gather up all the knowledge that we have acquired about designing throughout the semester and putting it all to use in one book. The book was to be of open topic- up for the student to decide. A lot of the project was very un-restricted, the size, the content and even the binding style was for me to decide. I had to use all the things we learned such as Gestalt, Color and Typography; namely Grid.
Process:
I initially started with a different idea for a book than I have now. I initially wanted to do a book on about different states of the human mind/body. For example, some of the content that I researched was about Ketosis which is a state of body where the body metabolizes fat in an increased rate. However, it was hard to come up with a unifying design that put everything together. So I switched to making a book about fish. The book was to be at least 16 pages, with 8 spreads, so I decided to make 7 spreads with fishes in them. The early sketches below were about the different states of the human body and I only have one sketch for my new fish topic.
Before the first interim crit, my spreads had both an illustration and images. The main constructive criticism that I received was how to unify the contents of the book it seems like a “series” in a way. Many people were telling me about how they thought the illustration was great, but didn’t fit well with the images in the next pages, so I decided to go fully illustration based.
When it came to designing the illustrations, there were a few complications. One was when my file for the inDesign got corrupted and would not save. I overcame this problem by saving the contents of the inDesign in an Adobe illustrator file. Another was fitting the theme of the “series.” One comment the professor gave me was that the my first two designs were rather abstract while the later ones were quite literal. I went around this by making the background color the color of the fish and only illustrating the minute details that define the fish. As for the font, I went with Futura Condensed Italics as I thought that it popped out very well without seeming too over the top, while keeping things sleek and clean. As for the font on my paragraphs I went with deja vu because it had a more sophisticated feel to it.
As for the content of my writings I tried to keep things interesting by including information that would appeal to the readers.
Process pictures:
Final spreads:
Finished product:
Overall, I thought it turned out a lot better than expected. I find it very important to listen to the reviews that I got on my crits and remarks by the professor. A lot of my changes that I got from my how people thought I could improve it and make it have more of a theme. All in all, I thought it was a really good project as it allowed me to express my creativity while using all the skills that I learned throughout the semester.
