World Festivals — Documentation
When starting this project, I strongly considered the shift from illustration to photography. Since I did a lot of illustration with my last project, I felt more comfortable working with it than photography; it was less daunting, however I also wanted to do something that allowed to me learn new skills.
To start, I drew a lot of inspiration from looking at magazines and looked at spreads such as the below:
Of these images, I would say that I drew upon the third image the most. I liked how the images were framed. The other magazine images focused more on full bleed images accompanied by a solid text pages. I didn’t want to get locked into that style and that would be harder for me to create variety with those spreads. The first and second pictures, however made me think more about the full bleed style as well as the importance of using high image quality, something I tried to preserve in my book.
Book Theme
I decided to do my book on World Festivals. My only real reason for this choice is that I find world festivals and cultures interesting. If through this book, I learnt something new just from the research for the textual content of the book, that would be a win.
Spread Sketches
At this time, I was open to having multiple world festivals per spread and many of the sketches reflect that. I realized later that that is not a good idea. Having two large colorful images not only creates a challange to find images that go together, but the images distract from each other. There would be too much going on on the page. The image and text heavy style is farther from the clean style that I had appreciated in my inspiration. The sketches also have a lot of text placed directly onto the images. In the earlier iterations I tried to work with placing text into the images, but it looked too different compared to the other spreads. In the other spreads, the text was placed inside a white margin around the image. When the text moves to the image, it eliminates the need for the white margin, creating two large differences between the spread with text on the image versus the spread with text off the image.
Moving forward from these spreads, I had more of an idea of how my spreads were structured. At this time, I was also thinking of alternating between black and white pages- referring to the colour of the margin around the image. I thought it would create contrast, and make the book look more interesting.
The Book Content
Since I was using photography that wasn’t mine, when searching for content, I was limited to Creative Commons. Already searching for specific and high quality images, this narrowed down my search quite a bit. It was hard to find images that had the same style and that would go together. Considering the length of the book and the amount of images I would need, I was not optimistic on finding that many images that would go together. It all came together when I was pushed to work to make the images my own. Maybe if I were to edit the images the same way, they would match each other, regardless of whether the original images matched each other or not.
I spent a lot of time experimenting with features in photoshop to see what I could do with these images to make them my own and to give them a similar style. I tried changing colours and adding colours, a lot of the stylize features, then I found a combination that I liked.
I realized that I wanted to find ways to standardize the images by lessening the detail of the image. So, I looked for ways to lessen the detail without blurring it. I still wanted the images to be of high quality and to be clear.
I liked the combination of first applying the oil paint feature then “maximizing.” With these effects, the image was also more forgiving to illustrations that I had in mind. Now, the illustrations were less likely to get lost amongst the detail of the image.
For the illustrations, I was thinking of something similar to the album art for “Disclosure” as pictured below:
I started to add the illustrations to the image. In photoshop, I used the pencil tool to draw the lines onto the image. The idea was to slightly outline the person/object that draws most attention in each image.
For this image, the man in white was the first thing I saw when I looked at this image, so I chose to focus on him. Initially the lines where thicker, less precise, and clearly hand drawn. When I took this style/image to the interim critique, I got negative feedback on how the lines were drawn. The concept of the lines themselves and the way the images were edited got a postitive response.
To edit the lines, I chose to import the image from Photoshop to Illustrator. In Illustrator, I had access to the pen tool which changed the way I drew the lines. With the pen tool I had more control, I could also go back and edit the lines using Command + Shift + C. Being able to make these changes really affected how precise I could be with the lines which made a significant difference on how the lines looked.
In the pen tool, I thought to also add these larger white lines that extend past the main object. It was my way of adding more to the image as a whole and tying in the outlined image to the rest of the picture.
After I felt like the image was where I wanted it to be, I tried experimenting with colour changes. Since I was outlining the image, I thought another way to accent it would be to make the rest of the image black and white.
After making this color change, I didn’t think that this edit did much for the image, so I decided not to pursue it
I finally placed the image into inDesign. In inDesign, I used the color picker to suggest the colour palette theme of the image. I needed the colours to be specific to each image since all the colour palettes of the images were so variant. The only way to appeal to all of them would have left me with very limited options in terms of colour.
At this time, I was also aligning the width of the textbox with the width of the festival title. Unfortunately, the rag on the body copy was very unappealing. Overtime, I changed the width of this text box as well as the text boxes in the other spreads.
After adding the grid, I made adjustments to the spacing between the title and the body copy.
In a similar fashion, the other spreads also started to come together:
With this spread, I tried to first place it on a black page, however, the white pages looked “cleaner.” With this page, I also struggled with the leading of the title and the leading between the text and the title. During this iteration, the space between the title and body was very tight.
Again, the width of the text box aligns with the width of the title.
At this time, I didn’t realize that grid on all the spreads should have the same number of rows and columns. At the end, I reformat all of the spreads to match this convention.
With this spread, I wanted to have the image bleed off. The image is very nice and colourful and I wanted to showcase it. The width of the textbox could not have been the width of the title in this case since the title was to short. Therefore, I chose to break the rule I had imposed on myself.
I wanted to switch things around for this spread. Part of what caused this was that neither image was large enough for me to use it in the spread.
Unfortunately, this spread was so different compared to the rest of the book, I had to change it. Firstly, it was the only image to use two pictures in a spread and to have text placed directly on the image and to have a black iamge and to outline an object and not a person. All these differences in one spread were too much. I did however continued to change this spread around to find ways to incorporate it.
This was a spread that I had sketched and not yet tried out. I was advised to focus on just this one image and expanding it. I tried to do so by copying the main lantern and adding it to the right side of the image. Now there was more to the image and it was enough to carry the spread.
The vertical title wasn’t fitting the rest of the book, so I changed to better fit the rest of the book.
I thought of leaving a margin on the edge to better match the other spreads.
The next spread caused me a little trouble because the title was very large compared to the other spreads.
I thought this was an interesting way to place the text, but it didn’t get very good feedback. In the next iteration, I moved “fiesta” up to the rest of the lines to create a block of text.
After working with these five spreads, finishing the rest of the book became a lot easier and faster. The other two spreads represent festivals Naadam and The Chinese New Year. I was very purposeful in choosing The Chinese New Year because of the colours most images surrounding the festival contain. I wanted a dark picture to accompany the “Yee Peng spread.” At the time, the “Yee Peng spread” was the only dark spread and the book needed to balance that. I also wanted red elements in the picture; many of the images have red in them, so I thought I would bring red to the cover.
I also decided to order the images from dark to light to give some order to the spreads.
Here is a summary of all the spreads until this point:
I got feedback on the kind of formatting variation that I was using, and I learned that there should more of a rhythm as to how I was varying my spreads. I had the same spread appear multiple times in a row, and I wouldn’t reintroduce them at any point. This style made it feel like there were three separate books in one.
I also got feedback on my body copy that the number of lines in the body should match each other from spread to spread. After some readjustment of the text box size and to the the body text itself, I was ready for my final iteration:
Cover
At this time, I had an idea for what I wanted to do for the cover. I went to Joann Fabric and picked out a thick red paper and a white, vinyl sheet of paper.
I liked matte feeling of the vinyl and how it would contrast the shiny white of the pages. I unfortunately didn’t realize how stark the difference between the two shades of white would be, and I retret not matching up the papers better.
I wanted to stick the vinyl paper onto the red paper and cut out an outline of the globe on it by using an X-acto knife. I thought the colour contrast between the white and red would be very sharp, and the paper would give the book a nice feel.
After using saddle-stitch to attach the cover and the spreads together, I was ready with my final product.
Final Book
