Project 5: Book
Print
May 2018
Individual
About this project
The purpose of this project was to plan, create, and develop a booklet of any topic of choice. While combining the skills of units past with the addition of using grids, the book could range from a short story to an informative book. The formats included type of paper, size of book, type of binding, and the length of book. The project was broad, and the only constraints I found was the time.
My final book was a series of short poems, each using two spreads. Small drawings and patterns were used as illustrations for the poems.
Sketches
Initially, I planned for the beginning of each poem to start on the right side of the spread, as if it were a new cover for each poem. Because all the poems were about common everyday objects, I wanted the theme of the book to be pretty simple, to match the style of the objects. The sketches were very blunt, and represented each poem very literally. I also thought I wanted the Japanese style binding in the beginning, thinking the complexity of it would be a nice balance with the simple theme of the book itself.
Process
First Iteration
My first iteration was a compilation of three spreads; I put my ideas from the sketches directly into Indesign.
After receiving feedback and analyzing it myself, it was pretty clear that even for this one poem, the concept had no fluidity throughout the pages. Even between the first spread, the contrast between the drawings and the title page was too obvious.
I wanted to keep the illustrations and drawings concept, but decided to stick to a smaller color palette. I also realized that a lot of my images were pixalated due to the size constraint; I opted to make my book 5 in. x 5 in. because the poems weren’t long, and I didn’t want a lot of empty space.
Second Iterations:
For my second iterations, I wanted to play around with the way I used color. I was deciding whether to use the fill and paint effect on illustrator, or keep the colored pencil texture in my original idea.
Feedback I received from this round was that the spreads did not exactly line up- something a lot more noticeable on print than on the computer. Also, the boxes around the titles were not very popular, and there still wasn’t much consistency among the spreads. However, as I kept illustrating through the poems, I realized how my ideas could come together a little more- through a sequence or pattern. My ideas became a lot more structured; instead of trying to independently illustrate something for each poem with a random number of spreads, I decided to make every poem two spreads; one for the title with a pattern of a symbol of it, and the other the actual poem with minimal design work to emphasize the poems- which thus led to my third iteration.
Third Iteration:
On the left are a few examples of three consecutive poems in the book. Though the objects are very different and have no correlation, I made them consistent by organizing them in color order. Within the whole book, the first one starts out as blue, and the last one, Lemons, ends with yellow. The text on the bottom right keeps the pages consistent.
At the bottom the poem that correlates with the poem, Lemons, and the poem that correlates with Tightrope. I made each poem’s background color match the color of the title pages’.
Conclusion
Overall, this project taught me the importance of consistency. Without it, it’s really confusing for the reader and hard to identify the purpose of the work. I really enjoyed being able to connect the idea of drawing things out but also using technology to develop and modify it into something coherent.
