Project 5 Documentation
I wanted to create a book about microcontrollers in this project. Here are my initial sketches:
These two sketches are covers. I wanted to incorporate circuits into the letters.
My first idea was putting two boards side by side on the same spread and do some sort of comparison. It felt a little tight, so I switched to one board per spread. I thought about putting the board in the middle and putting some tables, schematics and paragraphs beside it. I thought about scaling all boards by the same amount and adding a ruler to tell the size. I don’t like the crease going down the middle of the boards. I thought it would not look good when the spreads are printed out.
I then tried some modular designs and assign the different components I wanted to different boxes in the grid. I also added the tabs to the side of the pages after looking at the examples. I did not do this in the end because there were too many pages. One problem I had with modular grid was trying to fit the boxes I had drawn. I was afraid of white space.
I thought about spreading out the contents even further and use two spreads for each board. That way the pages looks less heavy. The first page for each board would be an introductory page that would have a picture of the board with some schematics. The second page would include some other picture of the board, along with a table of technical specifications and text.
These two sketches follow the modular grid design that contains all the information for one board on a single spread. I think there is too much information and the everything seems too be too tight together. Also, I the free pictures I found on the internet were not as flattering as I thought.
In this version I distributed the information about a board on two spreads. The spreads look a little too empty and the schematic looks too dense. I also thought there was a better way to arrange the components. I decided to keep going with the two spreads per board idea, and add some more content to the two images above. Instead of bringing the content from the dense spreads above, I chose to draw my own illustrations to fit the theme better.
I felt that there is too much stuff in the spread above, so I eliminated the meter and CPU in the middle of the spread and came up with the following:
The rectangle with two circles was supposed to be a distance sensor but I thought it looked like a robot head, so I added a body to the robot head.
For the second spread of each board, I had a general idea of adding more information about the board. One page in the spread would have a pin-out diagram of the board, and the second page would include a table and some other illustrations.
I felt that the CPU illustration on the right page above looked mediocre. Also the table looked like it was about the CPU instead of the whole board. My next idea was replacing the right page with a code snippet that looks like documentation for a piece of software. I tried to make the font and colors of this page to resemble a real coding environment. To make the text look even more similar to real software documentation, I used asterisk symbols to draw a table and found a way to spell out “Arduino Uno” with different symbols.
I followed a similar trend for the other boards:
I switched the pages of the second spread of each board around so that it is not repetitive.
For the cover, I continued with the idea I had in my sketches. I spelled out the name of the book in an LCD screen and hooked it up to an Arduino on the back page.
This is the final version:
In the final version, I drew new illustrations for the Arduino Mini and Arduino Nano. Additionally, I changed the color scheme of the first spread of each board. I also changed the documentation color in the second spread to match the color scheme of the first spread. I liked the Arduino Uno and Arduino Mini color schemes the best, because the documentation color and the board color beside it match closely. I couldn’t quite achieve the same effect with the other two boards.
Photos:
