Project 5: Book Design
For our 5th project, I chose to create an illustrated alphabet book. For this book, I wrote short narrative statements about fictional characters with names and things they do in life. It was a pretty broad book but I took a lot of inspiration for the stories from past memories and childhood. I created short slightly insightful statements about 26 “beings” all with different names that made up the alphabet. Illustrating each of these stories took a very long time, but I found it mostly enjoyable. The blue beings in this book are a character I’ve used in other pieces of art that I’ve made this semester in paintings, so it was interesting to create a world for them in drawing. My book has the dimensions of being 11" by 6".
Illustration Inspiration
For inspiration for my illustrations, I looked at chris simpson artist, Mrxyk & Moriceau and Abbi Jacobson (of Broad City). For Chris Simpson artist I really enjoyed just the oddness of all of his illustrations and the offbeat narrative he supplies with them. For Mrzyk & Moriceau I really wanted to emulate their cleverness in their illustrations. With Abbi Jacobson I really enjoy her use of color and her use of objects to tell stories. With my own illustrations I enjoy using the blue being character because it is ambiguous enough that the viewer can see themselves as the character and be able to relate to the narratives. There have been other iterations of the blue beings in other assignments that i’ve done. They first appeared in one of the covers for project 4 when we created book covers. I’ve also created two paintings with them.
Iterations
Since I had already written the writing portion of this book prior to it being assigned, I felt like these characters already existed in my mind so I didn’t feel the need to do much planning about what I wanted each page to look like. I also did not create many preliminary sketches since I knew that creating 28 drawings would take me awhile already, so I went right in to just creating the final images for the book.
Here are the spreads of the pages. (Not in the order of the alphabet)
Typography
For the typeface, I started out with a Baskerville font. I don’t know why maybe I just got soft on it after making a poster about Baskerville. Anyway, I received some feedback about changing the font to something that communicated with the illustrations better. I decided on Courier New as my font because the line weight was light enough to match the pen lines of my illustrations. As for placing the copy into the images, I wasn’t working with a grid explicitly but I was attempting to line up the text with other elements in the picture. Overall I’m pretty happy with the placement of the texts and I think it helps it balance them out.
Feedback
During the middle of the project I received some feedback. I was told to maybe make the colors in my images more saturated, however I kind of like the dinginess of them so I kept them the same. I also received the comment about one of my first images “Urma” where the type was hard to read over the illustration. I agreed with this, so in photoshop I erased some of my illustration and placed the text there. This was at a point where I had not drawn many of the images so going forward I drew the images while thinking about where I would put the text. I was also told that my images looked strange against a white paper, which I agreed with so I scanned a piece of paper that I was drawing on and used that as the background of all of my pages.
Overall, this project was really fun for me. I really enjoyed drawing all the images, even though it took a very long time and consumed my life for a bit. This project made me realize that I really do enjoy creating illustrations so that was useful for me to learn. For the actual making of the book I ran into some technical difficulties with large file sizes and printing those. For the first book I made, it was a mess since I made it with glue and I was rushed. For the second iteration of the book I made, I made it with double sided tape and actually binded it correctly (hopefully). This binding version didn’t come out exactly as I had wanted it to, but I found out that book binding takes patience and precision which are attributes I am working on getting. The final book binding came out alright, but I think in the future the narrated illustrations can function not in a book format.
I’m really happy that I was able to take this design course this semester because I really did learn a lot and it opened my eyes to a new perspective. As an art student at the beginning of this class I was thrown pretty off guard by all the rules and the need to effectively communicate something and have a reason for everything. But, I have learned to appreciate design in my own way and learn how to incorporate it into my own practice in a way that I enjoy.
