Project 5 — Process Documentation

This is my book I created, it is called Turquoise.

For our last project in this class, we had to make a book. We designed the layout and covers, wrote the content, and bound the book.

First, we had to come up with what our book was going to be about and what the content inside the book would be. I decided to do my book on my favorite color, turquoise. Inside the book is my art work that is/has turquoise in it and turquoise objects that I own. We began by sketching our ideas. We had to think about layout and how the content would work from page to page and as a spread.

Next, we began digitizing. But, before we started adding elements to pages in inDesign, we had to decide how big we wanted our book to be. I wanted each page to be a ratio of a photograph of 4x6 since my book would work with photos.

These are my round 1 iterations above. I was not quite sure how to use grid to help with the layout of my book. We had desk crits the next class and my professor showed me how to use grid to bring more clarity and consistency to my design.

Here (above) I switched grids and began to use it more to help align elements.

I began to design all of my pages using the new grid. I decided to split the book up into two different sections, Art and Objects. I also wanted to make my cover be cut outs of the images.

In my round 3 of iteration, I started to add more text to my pages and playing around with where to place the body copy. I incoporated the turquoise half border to try to tie the two sections together.

These new spreads in the Art section contained more information about the art pieces because of some of the feedback I receive from mid-crit. I also included a page on what the book was about. From here, I continued refining my spreads by figuring out where I wanted to place body copy, and what body copy I wanted to use. One suggestion in the object section was to play with the typography and use scale.

In round 5, I focused on trying to make the type treatment in the Object’s section more consistent by using graphic elements from the larger quotes.

We had one more individual meeting with the professor before we had to print and bind. During this meeting, it was suggested that I split the two sections up into two books, and bind it saddle stitch as dosey-doe. I decided to do this because the two sections were designed so differently that they didn’t seem like one book anymore. As I pushed to finish the books, I tried to focus on making each section more consistent within each other and decrease the amount of variability in typefaces/fonts, placement of images, placement of text, and alignment.

This is my final book.