Project 5: Process Documentation

Introduction

This project was very difficult for me. Coming up with a solid idea that I was actually interested in was one of the most difficult parts of the entire project. I started off with the intention of making a book that would be a user guide for a project that I’m currently working on called MCLobbies. After planning out the content of each page along with creating a front cover and starting on the first few pages of the book, I quickly realized that this topic wasn’t exactly that interesting to me and that I’d definitely struggle with it in the future if I decided to continue along with it.

At that time, Kendrick Lamar’s new album, titled DAMN. had just came out and I was listening to it pretty frequently. I was a huge fan of the album and realized that there were 14 songs in total, which if you include a front and back cover, would equal 16 pages in total. I decided at that moment to scrap all the work that I had on the previous book and explore this entirely new idea, hoping it would take me in a good direction. Ultimately, I believe that it did.

Iterations

One of the most challenging parts of this project was getting all of the information that I wanted (song lyrics, QR code, song title, and a little blurb about the song itself) onto the page of the book without it feeling repetitive and boring. I also wanted my stylistic choices to have Kendrick Lamar in mind, ensuring that they stuck to the overall theme of the album. The font used throughout the project is the same font used for the text on the album cover. The color red that is used on the project is the same exact color red used on the actual album cover. One of the first things that I did was try to recreate the album cover in Illustrator. I first created a brick wall, which I did by creating a grid of straight vertical and horizontal lines and then applying an effect to them that made them slightly wavy and predictable. Next, I attempted to create a gradient with a graininess, that would be reflective of bricks.

My first iteration didn’t look all that great because of the way that I had approached the problem. I made several different sections of bricks with different gradients and attempted to put them all together, which ultimately looked very chaotic, unnatural, and overall bad.

Before fixing the bricks, I decided to make Kendrick Lamar, which was pretty difficult to do. I didn’t want to be very detailed with my illustration but I wanted people to recognize who was on the front of my book and how it related to the actual album by Kendrick Lamar. After about an hour of messing with the pen tool in illustrator, I got something that looked pretty okay.

The next problem I had to try to solve was how I should fill in the illustration that I had created. Using solid colors would likely look out of place and unnatural and using a bunch of gradients to fill in the illustration would most likely fail as well. I decided to put it in front of the brick wall without any fill to see how it looked. I think it worked out pretty well.

Next, I fixed the brick background. I’m very happy with how it came out and feel as though it’s similar enough to the actual album cover of DAMN.

The next thing that I worked on was the actual grid and hierarchy of my pages. I decided to attempt this with the first two songs in the album, BLOOD. and DNA. Overall, it was very difficult to make this look good and fit all of the content on the page, but I tried my best and it ended up looking like this:

I had a lot of space at the bottom of the page that was unused so I planned to include an “About” section for each song in that space. After including that section, it looked like this:

At this point, it didn’t look horrible and I decided to add page numbers to represent the number of the specific song, which I found as redundant and unnecessary and would later be removed. Also when creating this, I didn’t realize that I could stray outside of the purple lines, but later utilized this as the dimensions for my book, after many formatting changes were made (which can be seen later). The QR code was created using a website and I was able to personalize it with coloring, adjusting the look of the boxes within it, and adding an image to the center. I created a crown which I used to represent the fact that Kendrick Lamar is the “king of rap”. Next I worked on a background for the pages in hopes that it would make them look less bland and add to the overall dark theme of the album.

It certainly looks better at this point but there’s definitely many issues that I would soon correct for before moving ahead to subsequent pages. First, the text was centered, which I thought at the time made reading it easier as it was lyrics, but after changing it to left alignment, I realized this wasn’t the case. next ,the QR code is unnecessarily large so I planned to downsize that as well. The formatting of the about section could use some work as well, and the background of the page would be a bit too dark in some places, and could use a lot of improvement. Also, the font size from one page to the next differed, which was inconsistent and didn’t look very good. After changing these things, the book instantly looked a lot better, and the hierarchy and consistency of the pages was something I was pretty happy about.

At this point, reformatting the background helped make things look a lot better. There’s still a lot of spacing issues throughout and the centered lyric text doesn’t look all that great, but it would soon be remedied in upcoming iterations. At this time, I also added an illustration to represent the first song on the album, BLOOD.

I was really happy with how this looked and continued on making pages for many of the other songs on the album. Doing this though made me realize that fitting all of the song lyrics on the page would be a near-impossible task for some songs. Because of this, I decided to increase the length of my book to 20 pages and put some songs on a single spread. Doing this would also allow me room for adding illustrations to those pages, such as the DNA. helix with all of the words in the song that Kendrick says are “inside his DNA” actually inside the DNA. illustration.

Another thing that I did to help make the book work as even more of a companion was make some pages have a darker background and some pages have a lighter background depending on the overall feeling of the song for that page. This would effectively create a contrast from one page to the next, which worked well and mimicked the feeling and mood of the songs.

Also shown above is that I had extended the borders of the pages so that they would connect in the middle (and not be separate, which is necessary as they’re printed as spreads). I also concerned myself with the margins of the pages and wanted to leave myself with about 3/4ths of an inch on either side before putting actual page content in.

On the right page on the picture above there’s a clear example of one of the main issues that I had ran into, which was fitting all of the text on the page.

I would also later align the text on both pages of a spread so that they were on the same start height, helping to create more consistency.

I made the back cover of the book in accordance with the back cover of the DAMN. album. I did this by maintaining the same colors and stylistic effects. I re-used my Kendrick image from the front cover but adjusted the angling of his head, which helped make it look similar to how he looked on the back cover of the album.

I then added some texture to help mimic the style of the back cover of the album, which looked pretty nice. In comparison to the back cover of the DAMN. album, I think it does a pretty good job. Note: The image of the back cover of my book isn’t cropped, but would be cropped in the same way that the image on the right looks.

Finally, I created a few more meaningful illustrations to my spreads, such as the faucets for the song LUST. where Kendrick exclaims “I need some water” several times throughout the song.

Overall, I’m very happy with how things came out and even though there were many iterations of this that took place, I think that ultimately, each one helped to move the project in an even better direction than before, including my choice of starting over with a completely new topic.

Thanks so much Kaylee and Julia for such an excellent class. I learned a lot of really useful things about design, Illustrator, and Indesign and I had a lot of fun while doing it.