Project 5 Final Documentation

Introduction

For this project, I was particularly interested in crowdsourcing the answer to one specific question. The idea of crowdsourcing is very interesting because it lets you get answers from people beyond your immediate social circles — who tend to have similar answers to you. For example, at CMU we are surrounded by relatively privileged peers, so their happy places may be drastically different than someone living in a third world country (or the same!) which is what I set out to discover.

I ended up posting on mechanical turk, and asking my friends: “What is your happy place?” I got some interesting answers, but a lot of overlapping answers. I took the similar answers and made haikus out of them, and ended up making a poetry book.

With regard to the design of this book, I wanted to experiment with a form of illustration besides drawing in illustrator or photography. I decided to play with laser cutting. Laser cutting a book is interesting because when you cut a hole in a page, you can obviously see the page behind it. This implied that my whole book needed to be very simple. Also the question remained: how was laser cutting relevant to my happy place concept?

Initial Sketches

Before thinking of the laser cutting idea, I was still planning to make this poetry book very simple. Poetry books tend to be simple. My first inspiration was the famous “Where the sidewalk ends” which features very simple poems with very simple illustrations.

My sketches played with the idea of composing one poem and one defining sketch on a page.

Next, I decided to sketch a simple layout with a different page size. The long page size felt even more simple than the page-sized layout I had originally started experimenting with. The long page seemed to fit with the idea of a poem.

Iterations and Process

I started my digital iterations set on the idea of using laser cutting. The idea of a “happy place” ended up being the description of very “dreamlike” places. I thought it would be fun to build a scene made up of a lot of people’s happy places. The last page would be a sort of “resolution” to the book where the entire scene ends up being a dream. A lot of people answered that their bed at home was their happy place, so that seemed fitting.

I made a mockup of a laser cut additive scene in Illlustrator:

The left of the page is the haiku, and the right of the page are cutouts.

I liked the idea, but something seemed predictable and confusing. I wanted to somehow isolate the new piece of the scene being added each time. I solved this issue by putting the additive scene on the left page, and the haiku featuring only the new addition cutout together on the right. Then, when I turned the page, the cutout that was on the right ended up being reflected on the left. (It was very confusing.)

My first attempt at laser cutting I did on regular paper and quickly realized the logistics of laser cutting: objects need to be closed and no details inside show up. Also, it is very easy to burn paper.

Then, I had to decide what type of paper I wanted to laser cut on. I went to the art store to get construction paper. The texture was nice, but I wasn’t sure if fedex could easily print on this, and I would be very limited in the colors I was able to print, so I decided to just print on white paper.

Next, I made my cutouts a little more detailed. This is what the final scene ended up looking like:

Putting the whole thing in a book that made sense was the hardest part of this project. I wanted the object that was on the right with the poem to be highlighted in the back by a specific color, and be white when I turned the page and it was added to the scene on the left. The first part I succeeded at, the second part I did not. It was surprisingly unintuitive to do both.

I made two separate files for this book. One was the Indesign file which I used to print at Fedex, and the other was an illustrator file that I exported as a “.dxf” in order to be able to laser cut with it. The two files had to be the same size and perfectly aligned for this to work. Luckily, I got it on the first try.

This is the illustrator file that I printed. The colorful circles are the backgrounds for the cutouts.

Below are the cutout files:

This shows the cutouts being added to the full scene.

Feedback and Reflection

The feedback I got mostly involved around two things: the colors and the background of the cutouts on the left. The colors were too bright for the somber mood of the book. I thought about this while designing, but also thought that the simplicity of the book needed something to “pop.” In hindsight, I think my peers were right and the book would have benefited from a more earthy-neutral color pallet. The cutout backgrounds on the left were an issue that I noticed, and I wish I had more time and more iterations to have fixed this. (Again, a very confusing process! But I definitely learned a lot.)