P5 Final Documentation

The purpose of our final project for CDF was to create a book on a topic of our choice using the tools and skills we’ve developed throughout the semester. This project gave me the freedom and the ability to explore ideas that were related to my interests and used the skills I’ve learned in CDF to produce a project that brings an idea to life in the form of a physical book. I had to bring together a variety of skills that I’ve added to my skill-set through each consecutive project leading up to this one such as typeface choice, hierarchy, illustrations, contrast, color scheme selection, alignment. These skills along with utilizing software such as Adobe Illustrator and In-design were what helped me successfully build my final project.

Overall, my goal for this project was to use everything I’ve learned in CDF to create one final piece of work that demonstrated all the skills I’ve accumulated.

Initial Ideas and Sketches

My first task I had to face in this project was research. I had to figure out what idea I wanted to explore and what my book was going to be about. I started brainstorming a variety of ideas, and attempted to think of ideas that were interesting to me and I would have fun exploring, as I was going to be spending a lot of time on this project, thus I’d enjoy myself much more if the topic I explored was enjoyable to me.

After a lot of brainstorming, I narrowed my ideas down to three main ideas I was considering. I have explained my ideas, research, and accompanied sketches below.

Rap Legends Book:

A book showcasing a variety of rap legends in the form of a “card game”. Growing up, I used to collect baseball and basketball cards all the time. These cards showcased the skill-set and career accolades of various players, and my friends and I would compete against each other to see who had the best players in their collection. I wanted to implement a similar style and create a book that showcased rap legends and their personal accolades using this “card” style. I am extremely into rap and hip hop music, so I thought that exploring this idea and getting to learn more about these performers would be really fun.

The above sketches and digital iteration demonstrate some of the thoughts that I had for this book about hip-hop legends. My cover page would be titled “10 hip-hop legends”, with an illustration of a crown or something royal to represent the fact that the artists in the book are the best of the best. The next page would serve as a table of contents for all the artists that are going to be explored. As you can see in the Tupac example, the pages would include a card with all the information about the artist including a “point-value”, which serves the purpose that basketball cards serve. These cards would showcase the artists personal and professional background.

Late Night Snack Recipe Book:

I have always been someone that enjoys a late night snack to accompany my pre-bed Netflix ritual. As college students, we are up quite late studying and it can be a pretty big hassle to feed our hunger. Therefore, I thought it would be useful and fun to create a recipe book that included various quick-to-make late night snacks.

The above sketches and digital iteration demonstrate my thought process for my late-night snack recipe book. The cover page would read as “6 Mouth-Watering Late Night Snacks”. The second page would be a menu listing all the food items that are going to be showcased. The rest of the book would serve as a menu. My idea was to span one dish on one entire two-page spread. The left side of the page would be an actual photo of the dish created and taken by me, while the right page of the book would be the basic recipe and instructions to cook the meal.

Mind Blowing Facts Book:

As a child and even more now, I really enjoy scrolling through random blogs or my Facebook feed and reading about some cool fact that I just would have never came across in the classroom or in any other setting. These facts always bring a smile to my face or make me over think about something I’ve just never put a second of thought into. I felt that this project would not only be entertaining to the user, but also would be quite fun for me, as I’d have the opportunity to learn various facts through the process.

Above are three different ideas for how I wanted to lay-out my mind-blowing fact book. These included different placements of the number of the fact, an illustration that depicts the fact, and the fact in text form itself. Below are a bunch of mind blowing facts that I picked out through my research.

Example Mind Blowing Facts:

1. You can’t hum while holding your nose.
2. Humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas.
3. There is a basketball court on the top floor of the U.S. Supreme Court Building known as the “highest court in the land.”
4. If a piece of paper were folded 42 times, it would reach to the moon.
5. You can’t hum while holding your nose.
6. Humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas.
7. There is a basketball court on the top floor of the U.S. Supreme Court Building known as the “highest court in the land.”
8. If a piece of paper were folded 42 times, it would reach to the moon.
9. Google’s founders were willing to sell to Excite for under $1 million in 1999 — but Excite turned them down.
10. There was a third Apple founder. Ronald Wayne sold his 10% stake for $800 in 1976.
11. Carrots were originally purple, until Dutch Farmers in the 17th century engineered orange ones.
12. There are several apartments in NYC that are more expensive than castles in Paris.
13. As a society, we take more picture in two minutes than were taken in the entire 19th century.
14. It rains diamonds on jupiter and saturn.
15. There is an entire ecosystem in your belly button.
16. If you could drive straight up to the sky, it would take about an hour to reach outer space.

Final Decision: 10 Mind Blowing Facts

After exploring some of my ideas through sketches and research, I really started getting into the idea of creating a mind-blowing facts book. There were a couple reasons why I was drawn away from my other ideas and towards this idea. In terms of the “rap legends” book, creating sketches made me realize that the whole concept of having a card-style theme would be really cool but it would be terribly difficult to create an illustration of the rapper himself. I could have created cartoon/rough illustrations of the artists but this would probably look quite unprofessional, and having a card representing the artist without a photo of the artist just wouldn’t look good. So, because I didn’t want to just steal images off the internet for my project, I decided to cross off this idea. In terms of the recipe book idea, I was very close to going forward with it, but I realized that the project would not require much work and just wouldn’t fully showcase what I’ve learned during my time in CDF. The most difficult part of the project would have been making the food. But, my plan was to merely take photos of the food, and then create a design for how I wanted to outline the recipe, and this would be the entirety of my project.

Thus, keeping the weaknesses of my other ideas in mind, I thought that making a mind-blowing fact book would be perfect. As mentioned earlier, I think the concept is fun for the reader and the creator, which was the main reason I was drawn to it. Additionally, I thought this was the best idea to showcase my skill-set. The project would require me to create a large amount of illustrations and also experiment with type-face and grids, which are all some of the major skills we’ve learned in CDF, and I thought that since this was our last project, it would make the most sense to showcase all of these skills.

Facts and Associated Sketches:

Below are the 10 facts that I narrowed down to for my book, and some of the sketches I created and some online outlines that I used to create my illustrations that match each of the facts. All of these sketches will be brought to life in my digital iterations later on in my documentation.

Title Page:

1. There was a third Apple founder. Ronald Wayne sold his 10% stake for $800 in 1976.

2. Google’s founders were willing to sell to Excite for under $1 million in 1999 — but Excite turned them down.

3. Humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas.

4. Carrots were originally purple, until Dutch Farmers in the 17th century engineered orange ones.

5. There is a basketball court on the top floor of the U.S. Supreme Court Building known as the “highest court in the land.”

6. There are several apartments in NYC that are more expensive than castles in Paris.

7. As a society, we take more picture in two minutes than were taken in the entire 19th century.

(Used various previous illustrations)

8. It rains diamonds on jupiter and saturn.

9. There is an entire ecosystem in your belly button.

10. If you could drive straight up to the sky, it would take about an hour to reach outer space.

(Used various previous illustrations)

After conducting comprehensive research and then sketching out various ideas, I was ready to use these sketches and begin my digital iterations for my idea.

Digital Iterations

I started off my digital iterations by choosing a background color that I enjoyed and experimenting with the title page. I really liked my mushroom cloud illustration representing “mind-blowing” as my main illustration for the title page. I also liked this red, white, and blue color scheme and thought it would be pretty good as a reoccurring theme throughout the book.

Soon, I realized that the blue background I had selected earlier was going to be a little hard to work with when I start incorporating my illustrations, as it was a little too bright and thus it would be difficult to create contrast between the background and the illustration. So, I decided to switch my background to a darker shade of blue which worked really well with the white and red text. I also decided to add my name to the cover page to make the title cover look more like a book.

I also started experimenting with my typeface. My thoughts on type face selection had a lot to do with figuring what the overarching theme and emotion my book is trying to elicit. The two potential options that I came up with in terms of an overarching theme were either making the book a formal fact book that was structured like an encyclopedia or making it a really fun, childish, and easy-to-read fact book. I decided to go with the latter option, because I myself enjoy reading facts such as these in a light-hearted fashion rather than in a serious setting. Moreover, a lot of the facts themselves are not serious or technical, so it would almost be misfitting for them to be in an encyclopedia format. Hence, even though there is great taboo associated with using comic-sans, I thought that it would work extremely well with the message of my book and the taboo associated with it is almost even funny in this setting.

I started experimenting with the first page of my book and my first fact. I realized that I really needed to figure out how I wanted to incorporate hierarchy, alignment, and illustrations into my first few pages and then after that, it would not be that difficult to follow the rules I had set in the first few pages and carry them out throughout the book. So, using the sketches shown above, I digitally outlined my sketches to come up with illustrations of my first fact. I first thought that having my title in a large font in the top-center of the page would be a good way to make the number of the fact stand out. Next, my illustration would be placed, and then a solid colored box behind the fact would be placed. I decided to go with this as my overall structure for the book.

Following the structure described above, I continued using my sketches to create illustrations and followed the structure I had decided on. I decided to determine the background color behind the test based on the colors in the illustration. So, above, I used brown, because I liked how it brought out the brown part of the banana.

Continuing with my overall structure, the above iterations are how I represented my fact about the supreme court. The above iterations were what I had ready for my first crit. During my one-on-one crit with Kaylee I received a lot of good feedback.

The feedback I received covered two main points:

• Focusing on alignment. I could really use the ruler tool on indesign to create a more smooth and structured flow throughout my pages by aligning illustrations with text.
• Create more overall unity. This could be through colors and illustration type. Some of my pages didn’t really work too well together because of the various colors and illustration-type, so it was important for me to come up with a way to unify my pieces a little more.

Using Kaylee’s feedback, I decided that using alignment was crucial for my book. So, I pushed the fact number to the left of the page and decided that for every page, I would align the number with the illustration to create more overall unity amongst the pages. Additionally, for the fact above, I added a crying man to my illustration to make the presence of Ronald Wayne a little more apparent, as that was not that easy to pick up earlier.

Another piece of feedback that I received from Kaylee was reconsidering the background boxes behind my text. I thought that those were quite distracting and added a lot of disunity to the pages, as they brought in different colors which were unnecessary. Thus I decided to eliminate those, and make the type face match the rest of the text by making it comic sans. Additionally, I made the type face larger so that it was easy to read.

This overall structure seemed to fit really well with the overall vibe that I was trying to capture through this book. The page above makes it clear that this book is mean to be fun and easy to read, and that the illustrations are not meant to be serious but more fun-loving.

Above is my 9th fact. Earlier, my 9th fact was the one about bananas. But, keeping my feedback about unity in mind, I thought that since the fact about Google was similar to the fact about Apple, it would make a lot more sense to have these two facts on the same spread. In addition, I used similar colors and strokes for both the facts to establish greater unity.

For my 9th fact, I wanted to continue with this overall fun-loving theme by illustrating the magnitude of the difference in googles valuation in 1997 and 2017 in terms of number of lamborghinis.

For my second spread, stuck with my human banana illustration from my previous draft. I continued following the overall structure of my book. Additionally, in an effort to establish greater unity, I got rid of the black strokes around the banana because none of my other illustrations had outlining strokes. So this made sure that all my illustrations followed a similar look.

For my 7th fact, I continued my established format and style. But as you can notice in the progression of my illustrations, at first the illustrations were quite dull and dark in color. But, after receiving in-class feedback from Kaylee, I realized that brightening up the colors in my illustration would unify the illustration with the bright banana illustration which is on the same spread. Thus, overall, the colors and the illustration type for this spread worked very well together.

My 6th fact continued on with my general theme.

I strategically used my 5th fact to match my 6th fact, which is on the same spread. Since both the facts are represented by similar illustrations and strokes they go really well together on the same spread, and thus maintain a level of unity within the book.

With the 4th fact, I had kept my final draft of this fact as the second iteration above, but felt quite unsatisfied as even though the illustration clearly depicts a selfie stick, the message isn’t extremely clear. So, that’s why I added two illustrations of two people taking selfies to further emphasize my message.

My 3rd fact also went in hand with the rest of the theme of this book. During this illustration, I really started to take care of the small details within my book. I noticed that there were several colors that I was reusing throughout the book, such as red. So, I took the opportunity to make sure all the reds being used throughout the book were exactly the same to establish greater unity.

The 2nd fact was my favorite fact and illustration in this book. The fact itself is just insane! But, I also really enjoyed creating this creative illustration of representing an ecosystem as being at way larger of a scale than what actually exists in your belly button. I played around with a lot of colors in this illustration, but I used the exact same blues, oranges, whites, and reds that were used throughout the book to establish unity.

I enjoyed this illustration a lot as well. I used many of the other components from other illustrations in this last final fact, such as the planets, the car, and the globe. I did this as a way to bring the entire story to one unified end. Again, as you can see in my iterations, I played around with color to make sure that the colors being used were the same throughout all my illustrations.

Above are the final spreads of my book. I think my documentation makes it quite clear how my book progressed from a not-so-unified collection of illustrations and spreads to a cohesive, fun, simplistic, and unified fact book. I really enjoyed this project because it forced me to use so many if not all the skills that I’ve learned throughout the semester, and as a result, made this a perfect piece to showcase what I’ve learned. The final pieces above are all touched up in terms of making sure alignment is correct, all the type face is the same, all the strokes are the same, and all similar colors are the same as well.

Reflection

Overall, I thought that this project was a success. Although it was quite difficult and I hit a couple road bumps along the way, once I determined and established a unifying theme and structure, the project became a breeze and I had a lot of fun with it. As I mentioned above, having to create such a large amount of illustrations really honed my skills on using pen tools. Furthermore, having to keep an eye out for unity, alignment, and color choices also greatly improved my eye for detail.

Some of the feedback that I received during the final crit about what I could improve on was the following:

• Making the illustrations match each other a little more
• Improving color contrasts
• Working a little more with grids

I think all the feedback I received was good and were a lot of the things that I had in mind throughout the process. Nonetheless, there is always room for improvement, so if I had a chance to make more adjustments to my piece, I most definitely would focus on the suggested improvements. I was, however, really pleased with the positive feedback I received, as many people enjoyed the book and thought it was fun and easy to read, which was exactly what I was going for.

In terms of my feedback about the critique, I thought it was a very creative and efficient way to get through all the projects, as going with our traditional white board critique would have taken way too long with our books. But, since we had a time constraint, I felt like the crit was a little rushed, as there wasn’t a lot of time to type up comments, therefore I felt like a lot of the comments I was giving were not focused and clear. Furthermore, since I was writing up comments while someone was presenting, it was hard to focus on both the presentation and my comments at the same time. So one suggestion that I can think of is perhaps assigning crit feedback as a homework assignment so we can all just enjoy the presentations, and can go back home and access the PDF’s of the books and take more time to critique the work. Nonetheless, I still thought it worked well and was a fan of having people come up in front of the class and showcase their work. The pizza was awesome too!