Project 5: Grids, Style, & Format
Project 5 involved using all the ideas explored in the course to create a booklet with special attention paid to use of grids, style, & format. I created a small booklet which combined drawings with typography to show how different movements can evoke different feelings. The project was inspired by my experience in dance and sports and the drawings were sourced from an assignment I created for the course 60–157 Drawing for Non-Majors.
As I began developing my ideas for the project, I took notes and sketched possible page layouts. I knew from the beginning that I wanted each movement to take up an entire spread. As I decided which movements to include, I also played with highlighting a specific body part for each movement.
My next step was to choose my page size and grid layout when I set up the document in InDesign. I knew I wanted the book to be small so it wouldn’t be too floppy and I wanted to be economical with my paper use so I chose a book size of 5" x 7". I set up a grid with four columns and five rows on each page. Since I knew my images would not remain bounded by the grid I aligned my text and shapes to it.
Since I was creating the booklet and the drawings in parallel, I started laying the booklet out using photographs I took of myself. I used the idea of highlighting a body part for each movement to determine where my text was located.
In my next round of iterations, I brought in a rough sketch of the movements for a couple pages. I experimented with including or leaving out the border I had initially created and decided to remove it. I also played with using transparency and the multiply function more to have different letters, colors, and sketches show through. One issue I still had to resolve was making the background text readable but not overpowering. These were the iterations I presented at the midpoint critique and the feedback I got was mostly to work on readability of the background words as well as to be careful with the colored bars.
In the next round, I started working on the front and back covers as well as an inside front page. I brought the colored bars from each page onto the cover and rotated them and used them as a sort of icon on the back cover and front inside page. I attempted to convey the feeling of movement with the rectangular bars by organizing them so they were not all lined up.
At this point in the process, I finished the physical drawings and inserted them into my digital book. To bring in my final drawings, I scanned the physical drawing in pieces and put them back together using Photoshop.
The other major changes I made in this step were to switch typeface and vary the size of the words in the background. I switched to Mission Gothic at the suggestion of the instructors and was pleased by how I could use the extra bold and italic together. I also adjusted some of the colored bars so the words would be easier to read. At this point, I was still struggling to include the words on the front cover in an organized and aesthetically pleasing fashion as well as with placing the images on the pages so they did not cut off halfway through.
In my final iterations, I adjusted some of the drawings in Photoshop so that I had the texture of my paper covering the entire spread and so that no lines cut off halfway across the page. I also adjusted text size on the front cover. Finally, I set up the appropriate cut and bleed marks as well as exporting the project as a booklet to print.
Since I wanted the book to have more weight and texture than regular printer paper, I bought 98 lb white Canson paper for the inside pages and 184 lb Canson paper for the cover. While I was pleased with how the texture turned out, especially how printing on the more textured paper gave a slightly watercolor like effect, the thicker paper was more difficult to print accurately so slight discrepancies in how pages on opposite sides of the paper lined up created small errors in my book.
If I were to continue this project, I would like to create more content for the inside pages. I was hesitant to simply explain why each movement was meaningful to me because I did not want to create a book that simply read like a list of my thoughts. However, I would like to work with that idea a little more to find a better balance between sharing all my feelings like a diary and the minimal approach I took with using words. Another change I would make if I had the time would be to make another iteration of the full drawing. While I was pleased with my thought process for creating the drawing, I felt that I could have connected the individual figures in a more interesting way. I would have liked to draw the figures larger and possibly have them overlap more.
