Final Project: Book Making Documentation
The goal of CDF class’s final project was incredibly straightforward.
It was to make a book of any sort.
Thus, I came up with a few ideas.
- A book about joining process of Sigma Alpha Epsilon.
- A book about a particular person (ex. Andrew Jaung)
- A book about having a bald head for a semester
- A book about someone’s Facebook history and funny posts. (which I decided to do of my own.)
After considering a few ideas, I took the idea of going through my own Facebook history and narrowed it down to a few more options.
I have three very close friends whom I met about five years ago. Ever since that, we stayed very tight and made many unforgettable memories.
(from left) Injung Kim, Julie Lee, Ted Kim, Junwoo Cheong (me)
Therefore, I wanted to create a book about my friendship with those three best friends, while still taking the idea of somehow incorporating Facebook. Initial idea was to go through my Facebook history and track down how our friendship developed on the platform of Facebook. Using the screenshots of those memories, I was going to illustrate each characters of us and make scenes that characters were in conversation.
= What I pictured it would be like
It was certainly an exciting idea; however I was faced with difficulty of pulling “only” the interactions of my and my three friends. Moreover, Injung did not ever have Facebook, and it was a quarter missing of our four friends — bonding.
So I rather decided to use Instagram platform. I thought it was easier just pulling out photos of us.
= After changing into Instagram idea.
Each page would have looked like it.
Also, at this point, I changed what part of our friendship to focus for the book. Unlike my original idea to explore how each of us met and built brotherhood, I switched my focus to our experience in the USA. Fortunately, all three of them decided to come visit CMU for Carnival.
= Character development process/ General plan
= Flowchart what the contents will look like.
For testing purposes, I created a brief prototype for the first critique. Not only illustrating characters takes quite a time, but also I was still not sure how to incorporate those illustrations by the screenshots of Instagram without ruining reader’s interaction.
= Everything on the pages are illustrated.
For this product, I was not particularly happy with how it turned out. It was quite far from what I imagined at first.
Comments from peers
- Add Colors
- Improve readability
- Add background color
- Texts are better off matching
- How is this different from those videos facebook makes that show “3 years of friendship” with so-and-so.
- Characters are nice.
- Layouts are static
- The phone could be the cover as a whole.
and many more criticism.
After this point, I was not sure of what I was doing because I could not see any advice to significantly improve the layout. Probably it is my job.
April 21st.
My friends came to Pittsburgh and I focused on hanging out with them and taking pictures.
= One of 2500 photos that I took in the span of 2 and half days.
Then, I created a separate Instagram account for just for 4 of us.
SACHONGSA <- stands for a group of 4 friends who are very close to each other and seen for a long time.
Despite of working for hours to improve book’s layout for better interaction with readers, I did not see how well it would come out.
Moreover, around this time, I began to pursue another interest that I found. Making cloths.
Therefore, I took a whole new direction and started making a lookbook of my own clothes and clothing ideas.
= few ideas for my own clothing
My plan for summer 2017 is to design and make my own street wears. So I felt very excited and happy to start this lookbook because I knew this would help a lot for me to have better ideas.
After looking through several well-known lookbook styles through several magazines, I chose a square paged lookbook with white backgrounds mixed with pastel-toned orange boxes.
Unfortunately, beyond this point, I forgot to take screenshots for the progress because I was too focused on creating works.
But, here is what my look book is about.
Brand title (Assuming I created one in the future): Kol:in
It is a business platform where a customer can create line works of themselves with friends or lover onto either t-shirts or crewneck sweatshirts that come in a variety of colors.
I will jump into a final product.
Final Product
During the process…
Here are a few pictures that show what I did to create this book.
^ They are the illustrations of T-shirts platform and crewneck sweatshirts platform which I created on Adobe Illustrator.
For this lookbook, I mostly used illustrator and indesign, and jumped back and forth.
Logo Designs. White goes very well with the orange color.
^ This shows how I worked on layout of white background and orange boxes to balance out the general theme of the book.
Some Logo design.
Using my own photos, I outlined them on illustrator and translated them onto fabrics.
After finishing the Kol:in look book…
Presenting my lookbook to readers and explaining that this is the design business that I want to launch at some point in my life was indeed exciting. I incredibly enjoyed working on this piece. Although I realized there are many parts that can be improved after actually printing out the book, I am certainly happy how it turned out. As if I were an actual designer who is about to launch an official branch, I tried to persuade readers to actively engage in my idea. This lookbook will not stop here but will continue to develop over this coming summer and further more.
