Project 5 — Visual Book
Communication Design Fundamentals
November — December 2017
This was the final project for the CDF course at Carnegie Mellon University. The purpose of the project was to design and craft a visual book, using principles of hierarchy, typography, and grid. I had a few ideas for the topic of the book, including Booth, noodles, and a lyric book. In the end, I chose to create a book of notable tea recipes in different countries. This book was made using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign.
For my initial sketches, I experimented with the content I wanted the book to contain. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make the book more informative with recipes and background information, or more visual with pictures of the tea and map locations of each country. In the sketches, I tried to create different grid structures to display information about each tea, like ingredients or short descriptions. I knew I wanted to highlight the look of the drinks themselves, the individual ingredients in the drinks, as well as their country of origin. It was a challenge to visualize the pages with text and judge the ratio of white space/images to text. I also had to to consider how the two pages would look side-by-side and if they would produce a cohesive spread.
I decided to iterate on a few sketches that had fewer bodies of text and, hence, more room to experiment with grid placement and content. For the first desk crit, I presented three digital versions of spreads for English tea. I found appropriate pictures for the tea, and decided to include them. I chose a color I thought represented English tea well, light blue, and tried to incorporate it in different blocks on the page. I also decided to include the English flag. In one spread, I represented the flag as a teabag.
During the first desk crit review, my instructor suggested that I iterate on the first two spreads, since the large amount of white space would make the unique elements of the tea pop more. She agreed that the drawing I found of the English black tea online would work well in the book. However, she encouraged me to create my own drawings instead of rely on media found online. She also encouraged me to keep the typefaces consistent. Ultimately, I decided to continue working on the middle spread, since the white space gave a clean look that highlighted the different pops of color. It would also be a challenge to find similar, high-quality images for all of the different countries. At the same time, I conducted more research on tea and narrowed down the list of countries to China, Japan, Turkey, Morocco, Russia, India, England, and America. Based on the last desk crit review, I made a few modifications to the last digital iteration. I used the same typeface for the body text as I did for the country name. I also attempted to use a colored background to see if carefully-chosen colors would make the pages more unique.
For the mid-crit review, I requested feedback on the following questions from my peers:
Should the spreads be white pages (England spread) or colored pages (China spread), or a mix? Is the recipe section and font too large? What content could I put besides the tea leaves on the right page? Thoughts on the placement/style of the quote?
My peers had a lot of helpful feedback. Their main feedback was that:
- Some people liked the mix of colored and white pages for the spreads, although red may be too strong a color for a full page. The white pages looked cleaner and made the illustrations pop more. They agreed on a consistent background color rather than a mix.
- The recipe and title, and country name were all battling for hierarchy, perhaps because I used the same typeface for everything or because of the placement of the recipe body copy. I could consider making the recipe more visual and take into account that the type is harder to read on red.
- In addition to tea leaves, I could consider including unique features of each tea (tea leaves, tea bags) and country, like traditional tea pots. There was a consensus that the tea illustration on the left page is too pixelated, and I should either find a higher resolution version or use the pen tool to make the image my own style.
- Many agreed the quote typeface is hard to read. I could consider removing the outline around the text, since it doesn’t seem to add to the design.
My instructor agreed with most of the feedback, and stressed that I should create my own illustrations instead of using the artwork I had found online. I realized that I would not be able to move forward in the design if I was constricted to the style of the online artwork. I decided to create the illustrations digitally, since I’m not very comfortable with drawing & shading myself. In order to make the artwork my own, I found images of unique teacups from each country and applied a ‘paint’ filter (I found that Microsoft Word actually worked well) which gave the image a more blurred, brushed effect that did not look like a photo. I then used the Adobe Illustrator pathfinder tool to trace the outline of the cup, using a non-uniform line. I also found two typefaces to use throughout the book: Blackjack as a script typeface, and Dinpro as a boxy sans serif typeface. The squarish sans serif was a nice contrast to the decorative script typeface.
Tracing the teacup images in Adobe Illustrator was a very time consuming, and sometimes challenging, process. Over time, I became better at using the pen tool and curve tool to create fluid traces. After creating the teacups, I wanted a way to frame the teacups, especially since white teacups would get lost in the white space. To do this, I found a color to best describe the taste of each tea, that also aligned with the colors important to that country’s culture. I then used the color as a border around the teacup.
Next, the most challenging task was organizing the ingredients and recipe section. Originally, I had intended to include a small description of each tea to better portray the character/uniqueness of each tea. After struggling to find good tea quotes from each country, I decided to find interesting facts about the history of each tea. However, I could not find a good way to place all of the components on the page without overwhelming it with content (the fact text, tea name, ingredients, recipe). After iterating over a few options, I found it would make the most sense to include the fact under the teacup on the left page, so that the recipe page would solely be for the actual taste/preparation of the tea. I didn’t want to disturb the figure created by the teacup, tea name, and country too greatly, so I made the fact text small and limited it to 2–3 lines.
For the actual recipe section, I decided to separate the grid into three parts: a short section introducing the tea, then a visual spread of the ingredients used in the recipe, and finally a recipe section on the bottom. To guide hierarchy and make the sections more obvious, I used the carefully-selected color and the script typeface for the headers and country name. I decided to include a small picture of each key ingredient used to make the tea, based on recipes found online. Since the ingredient section could only take up 1/3 page, I spread out the images across two rows. If multiple recipes used the same ingredient (like water and sugar), I used the same image for consistency. Based on the feedback from the mid-crit, I lowered the font size in the recipe section and made the actual instructions as succinct as possible to avoid overwhelming the page with small text. I played around with the grid structure of the spread and made sure it looked organized
Another challenge was making sure the grid alignment of each component across all country spreads was exactly the same (i.e. length of the flag/teabag, placement of the country name under the flag, and placement of the section headers and ingredient rows). In the end, I was pretty satisfied with the way the pictures and highlight color popped against the white page. Despite the large amount of information on the page, the white space conveyed the simplicity and balanced nature of tea. When it came to ordering the pages, I decided to order the teas generally from the least complex preparation (least ingredients, maintains the original tea leaves the most) to the most complex preparation. This naturally created an order of longest tea history to most recent tea history (starting with China, ending in U.S.A.).
The last challenge was designing a cover for the book. I perused many book cover projects on Dribbble and Behance for ideas, and drew inspiration from a few projects.
I liked the idea of using tea leaves and arranging them in an organized, eye-catching pattern. The result of my interpretation was a little too similar to the original, so I experimented with several different layouts. Among them was a spiral arrangement similar to the birds-eye view of a teacup — however, it was hard to convey that using only leaves.
Next, I found this simple depiction of a trip to Japan for a travel book. I really liked the use of colors to create value and different forms. I decided to try using tea leaves to create similar forms to represent tea leaves scattered at the bottom of a tea kettle. I was content with the result, and it also got me thinking about which color paper I should use for the cover.
The printing process was relatively straightforward. I decided to use a saddle stitch to bind the book, because it was relatively simple and fit the simplicity of the book. Using Adobe InDesign allowed me to easily create a book during the printing process because it automatically rearranged the pages for me. However, the printed result wasn’t ideal. I found that the small images of ingredients were heavily pixelated, and even though I reprinted the spreads with higher-quality images, they still turned out blurry. In addition, I accidentally printed the book cover on the more textured side of the paper. As a result, the colors and tea leaves came out grainy. Although this wasn’t originally intended, I think the rustic look added an earthy feel to the book, reminiscent of the earthiness of tea.
In conclusion, this final project was enjoyable and I learned several new skills. Although the process of creating the spreads and finding all of the relevant visual and informative content was quite time-consuming, having created a physical book in the end was very cool. My classmates and instructors had plenty of great feedback that I was really able to incorporate into my final design. From the start of the CDF course to the conclusion of this project, I feel like I’ve learned a lot regarding principles of white/dark space, typography, color choices, hierarchy, craft, and creating grid structure. While my final design could be improved, I’m satisfied with the result and excited for new design challenges where I can incorporate the skills I used in this project and course.
