Project Five: Final Documentation
Introduction
The objective of this project was to create a bound book with whatever content we desired. The only requirements were that we only use our own work when dealing with illustrations and pictures, and that there be both imagery and text in the final product. Due to the format of a book, the total amount of pages have to be in multiples of 4; for this project, we were expected to have 12–16 pages, though more was definitely allowed as well.
This final product was meant to tie in all of the design principles we had learned throughout this semester while also thinking about the contextual relationship between our product and our design. To briefly recap, these principles include grid, color, typography, and hierarchy. Some new skills that were valuable to this project also included materials and presentation, as well as theme (both adhering to and subverting qualities of a theme).
To sum up the importance of this project: in class, we watched a TED Talk by Chip Kidd which really raised the importance of the design process in the perception and storytelling experience of a book. Kidd describes how the reading experience is enhanced and dimension is added to content by the design choices used in book covers, though this applies broadly to the typography, cut of pages, size of the book, and many other physical elements that go into book design.
Initial Sketches and Inspiration
When I first began thinking of ideas for this project, I originally wanted to d0 something really creative or new: I thought about doing an anthology of poems, a children’s book, or a selection of cat-breed descriptions. I started looking for inspiration there and the following pictures are a little bit of what I was looking for:
I narrowed down my options for books after thinking about the plausibility of each type of book:
- The cat-book would require heavy illustration, which I would love to do if I had the time — unfortunately, the operative word here is “time”.
- Same thing for the cat-book applied to the children’s book: though illustrations could also be simple, I found myself at a loss for a story.
- I could definitely have done an anthology, but I wasn’t sure how to incorporate graphics.
After thinking about these problems for a while, I decided to leaf through my drive of photography and decided to take the artsy and minimalist vibe that I intended for the anthology and turn it into a dessert cookbook instead. Below are some of the pieces that further inspired my move towards a cookbook:
From here I decided to do some sketches, focusing on content layout: I knew I had photography that I wanted to include, and that I wanted the photos to be the featured part of the cookbook without overloading the informative text in the book (i.e. the recipe and the ingredients).
I also planned out what I wanted in different areas, with the first spread being editor’s note and table of contents, and the rest of the book being recipes, with 2 spreads representing one recipe.
At this point, I had no idea how I wanted to bind my book, and I also began looking at what recipes I would use and how I would edit my photos. I ended up picking 3 recipes and began editing photos in Photoshop.
Digital Iterations
The first set of two spreads I made had a lot of white space and had text spread evenly between all four pages. The main objective of this layout was to make sure that I did have enough content to fill 4 pages (and thus ensure that I could reach the total 12–16 page requirement).
As a result, the pages have more of a top-down hierarchy on every single page, with blocks of text on every page but the last. Overall i was glad I could feature the majority of the photos documenting the baking process, but I did find that the text was hard to read in this arrangement, especially because the leading was the same for all text. I also found myself filling space with text where I wasn’t comfortable putting text: for example, the 4th page of these two spreads features two images but has text squeezed between them. The text feels out of place compared to the two images, and I’m not sure where I should look first when I look at it.
Regardless of how it ended up looking, I found making this spread very useful in planning how I was going to approach the rest of my book. I knew that I wanted to give the text some room to breathe, and that some of the text could be cut. I also knew that I liked the typeface but that I wanted to change the hierarchy of the text to make it more readable.
Critique and refinements in digital iterations
After presenting the two spreads above, I received the following critiques:
- Step by step pictures might help
- Hierarchy could be improved
- The recipe text could be ‘sectioned out’ with some pictures or illustrations so there isn’t a big block of text on the page
- Move the tips into another box
- Add illustrations
- Explore other layouts in cookbooks
- White background is not interesting
- The title font seems generic
- Too much white space
- Text is too big
- Too wordy
- Experiment with more graphic elements
- Photos are dim
- People like ‘tasty’ pictures and videos, so try to make the photos embody that tasty concept
- Color, space, and hierarchy could be improved
- Try bleeding the images off the page
- Take risks!
I definitely agreed with the majority of the critique I received: almost every area of my current design received critique, and I knew I had a lot of work to do. Overall, I got the vibe from the comments that my work was, in general, pretty boring. The interesting part was the pictures, and the informative part was the text, so both should be featured more prominently.
I think my original approach to the book was to use white space much like a novel has white space around its text. However, cookbooks have considerably less text and thus do not need to have text on every single page. Though white space might have worked if I had a picture to accompany every step, I didn’t want to re-shoot the photos I already had to redo the book that way. As a result, I decided in later iterations to eliminate as much white space as possible: after all, all of my photos have a foreground and a background in them, so the background of those pictures should act as the background for each page instead of using white space as a background.
I also found that the text itself was relatively hard to read as is: though the text size was large, the leading between each line was pretty small and the indentation for steps also made it hard to read. Effectively, the only necessary text for each recipe was the name of the recipe, the ingredients, and the recipe itself, with tips being an additional item that could be added in. In future iterations I decided to focus on those essential type elements and eliminate unnecessary text that removed the reader from the experience. The text size was also overly large on the recipe title page, so I knew I would have to toy around with that too, especially when considering how large my book would be.
Though some did like my photos, I also realized that many of them were dark and cold in color. One person commented that it would help to make the items look tasty, so I knew I would have to go back and edit the photos to make them look more appealing to the reader. Because the photos are the objects of interest, I decided to feature them more prominently and not use as many photos. Reducing the number of photos also helped de-clutter the pages with white space.
Post-critique changes
Above is the first spread I changed after the critiques: I increased the size of the photos on each page and removed any unnecessary text. In the above iteration I forgot to include the ingredients, but regardless I found that the majority of the text could be placed on one page. One thought that occurred to me was that chapters in books often begin on the right hand page and leave the left hand page blank: I tried incorporating that idea into the second spread (on the right above) but I still found that the left hand side of the image was very sparse. I also didn’t like having to change the text color of the title to white, especially because it contrasted with the black text on the instruction page.
However, I did prefer having my images blown up on each spread, which gave a main focus to every page. This was considerably better than my first set of spreads, which had too much going on in each page between both text and multiple images. I did find some conflict happening between each page — because the image was different from one page to another, the spreads felt very separated. In later iterations I decided to use one image across both pages in some spreads, which helped unify pages in a single unit.
To reduce the conflict between the photography and the text, I decided to put all informative text together in a kind of ‘recipe card’ looking box on the second page of each set of 2 recipe spreads. These changes are reflected below, in my second set of post-critique changes:
As you can see, I focused all of the text in one ‘recipe card’ area and worked on the presentation of that information there. One thing I did notice for my print out critique was that my text size was very large: since I was planning on having an 8 inch by 10 inch book, the page size would be close to that of the print out and I knew I could decrease the font size from a size 14 to around a size 10. I also found it more appropriate to use only lowercase in the recipe title to link them to the title of the book itself (simply sweet, all in lowercase). In an attempt to visually distinguish the ingredients and the recipe, I used a line of dots (preset in InDesign) to separate the header from the ingredients and the ingredients from the recipe. Later iterations also included subheadings for the ingredients and the recipe in small caps, with other titles within those sections also done in small caps for the sake of consistency. All of these small visual changes helped unite the text as a whole and make everything thematically similar while still visually separated, with title, ingredients, and recipe separately nicely on the same rectangle.
I also spent some time deciding between having a vertical layout (top down, with title, then ingredients, then recipe) or horizontal layout (with ingredients and recipe next to each other). I found that in general the vertical one made more sense, especially because some of the recipes had a lot fewer ingredients which wasted a lot of space on the left column with ingredients. I did have to balance out the ingredients in the vertical layout into multiple columns to make it more readable, and so I could increase the leading to the degree that I wanted. After choosing the vertical layout, I played around with the size of the box and decided to use the same type of vertical grid for every recipe set for the sake of consistency and readability.
Overall, I wanted to increase leading between ingredients and between steps in the recipes. I also changed the indentations so all numbers were in one column and steps were in another column. Leading was also done so that if a step ran onto two or more lines that the leading for that step was closer to itself than it was to the next step or the previous step. This helped with readability by making each step seem distinct from any other step and by separating each ingredient into its own item while still being read as a list of ingredients.
After having Julia look at my spreads, I also changed the color of the boxes from a beige color (originally used to make the book seem warmer in tone and more like parchment) to pure white and decreasing the opacity of the box. This way, you could see through the box and get more of the image underneath it, while still having a visual distinction between the image and the text on top of it.
Another choice I made was to move the tip box on to the next spread: in most instances, the tips relate somewhat to the images presented (for example, the strawberry tip for the pudding is featured on a page that has pudding with strawberries) without taking away from the picture. Where the first spread focuses on the text with the recipe, the second spread focuses on the image with the tips merely giving some tips to connect it with the text from the previous spread. Eventually I also decided to make the Tips header in small caps, just like the recipe headers, thus increasing continuity between text on all pages. I also reused the dotted lines in the recipe text on the spread with the editor’s note and the table of contents, again to aid visually (the line separates the heading from the rest of the text) but also to increase continuity between that spread and the recipe spreads.
Final Product
Reflection
Overall, I really enjoyed the process of making this book! It was really exciting to use my own photography and recipes to make something meaningful to me: I can’t describe how exciting it was to hold the final physical copy in my hands when it was all said and done.
I definitely learned a lot about how to rethink, restart, and reinvent concepts within my work. I found myself very lost at times trying to immediately find what ‘worked best’ for a dessert cookbook, but the only way to find out what was best was to explore a variety of different subtlety different concepts and compare their merits.
Of course, I learned a lot about bookbinding and the thought process that goes into designing pages, spreads, and including photography in print. It was really fun getting to know InDesign well, especially because it has a lot of fundamental differences from Illustrator that make it so interesting to use for text-heavy materials like a book. I think one thing I could have possibly explored with InDesign would have been trying to incorporate illustrations into my book, though honestly I prefer how simple my final product was. It definitely would have been a learning experience to combine the two softwares, but at the end of the day I do believe it suited my book best to use photography, boxes, and lines to shape my book’s graphic experience.
In the future, I hope I can use everything I’ve learned in this project and course to not only design work that communicates effectively and engages its audience, but also to use my knowledge of the design process to understand the how and why behind design in the world around me! Design pervades our culture and communication between people, and by understanding why things are designed the way they are, we learn more about how to effectively communicate our ideas with our peers.
