Project 5 Grids, Style, & Format
The goal of this project is to create a bound book of our choice of content.
By incorporating our knowledge of topography and systems, we discovered multiple techniques of using text and imagery to match and enhance the content that we design for.
The format of the book including the size, illustration, paper type and binding process is informed by the content and ultimately works for the content.
I. Sketches
Initially I wanted to design a book about the purity of ingredients. Like most people in my hometown, I consider eating as an important of daily life. The freshness of ingredient usually serves as a major criteria for the quality of the dish. In the first round of sketches I picked salmon, mushroom and beef as ingredients because they have interesting texture. And I planned to take photos for the texture of the front and back of each set of spreads.
II. Concept & Content
Then I decided to narrow down the selection of ingredients, and focused solely on the seafood of my hometown, Fuzhou. Fuzhou is a coastal city in the southeastern part of China, which is famous for its hot weather and good seafood. So during the content gathering process, I got the map of city and locate its position relative to the province and the country as the introduction of the book, and chose two photographs of the ocean.
I envisioned the book to be a little booklet is placed on the tea table of the living room, that can be flipped through easily and can provide a succinct but intriguing overview of how each kind of seafood is prepared to accentuates its original flavor. So the size of the book is made to be 6" x 6", relatively small but gives enough detail.
I chose six kinds of seafood that are most commonly seen and captures the variety. I then drew illustrations of them with pen.
III. Digital Iteration
1st Iteration:
In the first iteration I tested out two different ways of positioning and coloring the illustrations for each spread. I decided to add in traditional Chinese characters for each type of seafood, and layout a label template that will be placed underneath the illustration to place the other ingredients that will go with the dish. And to the right of the spread I created place holder for the simple recipes provided by my mom.
The feedback I received for this iteration was that the detail of the illustration got lost in the inverse coloring version, and that I could play with scale of the illustration to really emphasize the seafood itself to establish hierarchy among elements on the page. In this iteration the size of the page number is competing attention with the illustration, and there was not really any focal point due to the lack of hierarchy and position of different elements.
2nd Iteration:
Based on the feedback, I decided to scale up the illustrations, accentuate the theme color for each spread and add a little vintage feeling by incorporating distress texture.
By splitting the illustration into two pages, it created a visual continuity in terms of content.
The feedback I received for this round was that the solid color of the right page and the texture used in the left page makes them look like two completely different style of images. I should also be more careful about the positioning of text and the label box in relation to the illustration elements.
3rd Iteration:
Based on the feedback from last time, I made the solid color to the right to be a light gradient color, dded the ingredients that go with the featured seafood into the label box, and added illustration of a featured ingredients in the middle.
The feedback included that the left and right pages still look a little visually disconnected, and the positioning of the key ingredient is a little strange.
Final Iteration:
I brought the distress texture in the left page across the entire spread, and reduce the opacity of the key ingredients and moved it towards the right.
For the images, I decided to use halftone effect in order to match the style of the rest of the pages.
IV. Final Printed Book
I chose to print the spreads on Arches Text Wove, a kind of paper that has a off-white tone and a nice texture. For the cover I chose to print on a heavier weight stock, Lenox. Due to the limitation of printing, I had to hand trim all the papers into 11" x 17" in order to fit into the printer.
I also laser cut the title out on the front page to get interesting lighting effect as well as to reveal the dark red layer underneath to give more depth to the layers.
