Project Five
Grid — Documentation
Final Design
Project Brief
The goal of Project Five was to design a complete book by using a grid layout of our choice and to bind it to create a physical deliverable. I decided to compile my photographs of cafes that I have enjoyed going to in Copenhagen to create a travel journal + guide to introduce a few of my favorite cafes. I also decided to make it more personal by adding watercolor illustrations of different types of coffee that I would recommend to drink at each cafe and describing its atmosphere. My main goal of using the grid was to create the Scandinavian magazine-like feeling, to stay within a clean and minimal overarching grid while making each page dynamic so that the next page would not be predictable.
Sketches
The preliminary sketching process included choosing an appropriate book size. I referenced booklets and Field Notes that are intended to be carried around to settle on about approximately 5"x7", which was also big enough for the photos to be seen in detail. My initial sketches show that I put the coffee illustrations as the primary content, placing the illustration and coffee name by itself as a subtitle page for each cafe. Primary concern for photograph layout was to have enough white space and to utilize diagonals as much as possible to avoid making the book monotonous. Moving on to digital iterations, it was challenging to deal with the amount of text content and photos. Going back and forth from InDesign to sketching, I had to figure out how to arrange the text and photos according to the thematic layout without making the pages overcrowded.
Digital Iterations
In the interim digital iteration, I created vector icons for the coffee and a map. However, I received feedbacks that the vectors look to stiff and that it does not go with the warm feelings of the photos. Other feedbacks included that the spread that have a larger photo works better than small ones, and it was difficult to locate the cafe name due to lack of hierarchy in the body copy and the cafe/coffee names.
The final iterations involved tweaking the length of the body copy, whether I was to go with a 2-column or a single-column body. In order to be consistent and give variations to the layout, the text does not stretch fully across the photograph. Spreads that has more than two images were most interesting to lay out, trying to make them different from each other. Instead of sparing one full page to the coffee illustration, the cafe name and address became the subtitle page but in order to keep the coffee as another organizing element, the illustration is placed on the same outside corner of the right page for each cafe. The cover is an overlay of a laser-cut page (“Kaffe” is Danish for coffee) over a watercolor background that was made to look like coffee spilled on the book. One final feedback that I thought was very useful was that because the body copy did not always include the cafe name in it, it was easy for the reader to forget which cafe they were reading about.
