Travel Book Documentation
Final Project for Communication Design Fundamentals
Concept
For this project, we were asked to make a visual book about anything we wanted. When I first learned about the topic, a few ideas came to mind:
- Cookbook
I really enjoy cooking and ran a YouTube channel about food for fun, so I really wanted to do this at first. However, I knew that picking this topic might not challenge me as much. Some of the pictures and designs that I had already done for the channel might be reused. Furthermore, I felt that my portfolio had too much stuff related to or about food. Consequently, I decided to do this as backup.
2. Photobook
I also considered doing a photobook of sorts, but I didn’t know what the photobook would be about.
3. Children’s storybook
I also considered doing a children’s storybook, but I decided not to because I didn’t know what to write about.
At a friend’s suggestion, I decided to do a travel guide about Taiwan. Originally, I was planning to do it about a number of cities in Asia, but given the time limitations as well as the length of the book, it was better to narrow it down to just one location.
Sketches
Here are my initial sketches for the travel book:
The book would a 9 by 7.5 size with full bleed. I organized the content by specific cities and counties in Taiwan, followed by other useful information about the country.
When I was conceptualizing my ideas, I wanted the travel book to be illustration driven rather than photo driven. I felt that this would not only challenge my ability to do illustrations but also allow me to try something different.
Phase 1 Design
Draft #1
Here are my first drafts. I tried matching handwritten style fonts with each, but I didn’t really like the feel of it. I also did not like the grid that I had set up. It did not make much sense in terms of organization and was quite hard for a reader to follow. As a result, I changed the layout in my later iterations.
At the same time, I was also experimenting with line art styles for the front cover. The feel of the art on the cover would be consistent with the rest of the book. I was inspired by some of the things I had seen previously as well as some illustrations I had seen on Pinterest like this:
Because I did not like how straight the lines were, I consistently experimented with my illustration styles throughout my iterations. I also played around with the thickness of the lines and the brush stroke for different feels.
After some discussion with an instructor, I made a few changes to my book set-up. First, my current spreads were too big. The purpose of a travel book is for people to be able to carry it around as they explore, so making an 9 by 7.5 inch book was too much. I scaled it down at first, but I soon realized that my spreads were too square. As a result, the book was resized to 6 by 4.5 inch. During this discussion, we also talked about sources of inspiration and references. I was given a suggestion to look at The Hunt City Guides. These were an excellent source of inspiration and gave me lots of ideas about the different things I could try in terms of layout and design.
Later, I finished the back cover and decided to have the skyline extend all the way from the back cover to the front cover. I felt that this would be really fun for a reader to experience. I also played around with adding color to the illustration, but I did not like how it turned out and kind of detracted from the illustration and feel I was going for.
Leaving that as is, I began to experiment with other fonts to go on the cover. I wanted to use san-serif fonts to give a modern, adventurous vibe to my book. I also tried putting the title in different locations to see how it would look.
While I was doing this, I was also working on different illustrations to put into my book such as the flag below. Using some of the cool effects in Illustrator, I tried to see if I could give it a hand-drawn effect. Instead of looking like pen, it ended up looking like colored-pencil. Nevertheless, it was still an interesting experience.
I continued to experiment with fonts, font sizes and placement on the cover.
I also decided to add a map of Taiwan into my book. I traced around a picture I found on Google and began to add to locations that I thought were important. I initially decided that an empty outline was too plain, so I tried adding some more detail with colors. However, after experimenting for a while, I was not happy with how the map looked. As a result, I reverted it to an outline and kept the topographic features on the map.
In the process of designing, I indirectly came up with a color scheme for my book: red and blue. I thought these bright primary colors worked well with my concept.
I initially labeled the cities in the map (above), but since it was becoming too cluttered. In addition, by moving the labels out of the map, I could add more information about the tourist sites at each location.
When I was placing the illustration into my book, I tried keeping the map upright. However, it was quite difficult to add all the information I needed to have on one single page. Consequently, I rotated it on its side and made the map extend the the full length of the spread. I added angular lines pointing to each dot, which helped strengthen the line art feel of my book. I played around the with placement of each of the boxes on the map page to make it easier for a reader to navigate through.
Like mentioned before, I ended up redoing my spread. This time, I tried going for a 4-column layout. After looking at a number of travel guides, I ended up trying to stuff too much information into the page. I also planned to add lots of small illustrations to give the spread character.
Draft #2
At the critique session, a few things were brought to my attention. First, the map was hard for people to read because they had to turn the page on its side. Second, the information spread, “Taiwan in a nutshell,” was too cluttered and lacked consistency. Some paragraphs were indented, while others were not, and the margins were not the same across each of the paragraphs. Lastly, overall, my book really was not very eye-catching.
Phase 2 Design
After taking all the feedback into consideration, I was quite stumped as to which direction I should take my book. I was having a lot of trouble deciding how much information to put on my book and how to organize the information. Furthermore, I was looking for ways to brighten up my book and make it more exciting. While I presented my book in a draft state and mostly a rough idea, I was unsure how to make my ideas become a reality.
First, I experimented with coloring more of my illustrations, trying out different color fills and textures in the brushes. After a few tries, I did not like how the color interacted with the lines. As a result, I left it as is and moved on to working on the map.
I messed around the with layouts of the map after turning it upright (according to people’s suggestions). I decided to the move the map to right page of the spread and lay all the other information around it. After another discussion with the instructor, I decided to change the blue location markers into numbers and have those numbers refer to various locations and details about each place, kind of like a key. I never got around to implementing this because my book ended up taking off in a different direction.
Instead of fixing the “Taiwan in a nutshell” page, I started working on the city spreads. I figured that after I worked out the layout for one spread, the rest of the spreads would come rather easily. I talked to a few of my friends about the things they would want to see in a travel book and reorganized and condensed the content for the spread. At first, I split the page into a summary, a places to see section, a food to eat section, and a shopping section. Again, I was having problems with clutter, so I simplified to 2 things: a summary of the location and a list of places to see.
After noting the lack of color in the spread, I decided that adding photos would help, so I went through my hard drive for some pictures. While adding the photo helped a lot, the text was impossible to see. I tried adding an overlay of black and then white to combat the problem. That did help with text visibility, but it significantly dulled the colors in the images. I was having trouble finding the balance between the image and the words on the page, so I decided to ask some of the people around me for feedback. One of my friends had previously taken this class, so I asked to see what she had done for her final project. After drawing some fresh ideas and inspiration from her, I took my project into direction.
Phase 3 Design
Instead of being an illustration driven travel book, I decided to make the book a photographic narrative with a little bit of text. Each page would be a snapshot with some details about the page. Rather than trying to show a reader my insight of Taiwan through a travel guide, I would show them through pictures. Because of the change in direction, I once again resized my pages to 8 by 6 inches. It made more sense for a photography book to have larger images.
Layout
For this spread, I got to experiment with the text placement in many interesting ways. I played around the text and object relationship and the had the text flow through the white space in the object. I also resized the font a few times in all the pages while making this book.
I ended up choosing the middle picture in the row above for my book. Even though the picture on the left has a lot of interesting things going on the picture (the people and the colors), I decided to use the center picture because it had more empty space for me to work with. As for the picture on the right, I decided not to include because the quality of the photo as quite grainy. (It was a still frame taken from a video.) I still really wanted to include it because I felt that convenience stores in Taiwan are a very unique experience for people.
This spread’s picture was a little bit hard for me to edit, but the result was nice. The picture was taken at a reflection pool at the Sun Moon Lake visitor center. In the original photo, the colors did not show up very well, and the reflection was not very clear. I experimented around with the colors and asked some of my friends who are more experienced in photography to give me advice. I wish (in retrospect) that I did not cut off the top of the tree in the picture.
Likewise with the above spread, I made a few adjustments to the the placement of the text and let the scenery speak for itself.
This spread is probably my favorite spread of the book. When I was picking out pictures of pearl milk tea to put into the book, I ended up picking this one because the background is more lively and colorful.
I tried to create a diagonal relationship between the side of the sup and the edge. I also tried to place the image in way that it would be slightly off to the side (rule of 2/3s — sort of). That way, the image would draw in a viewer’s eye more easily. Another problem I had with this spread was that the text was a little bit unclear in some parts because of the background. To resolve this problem, I used photoshop to darken the areas behind the text.
At first, I had trouble deciding where to put the text on this photo because of the mixed dark and light colors in the background. I received a suggestion to put the text at the bottom of left page, and it ended up working quite well.
Lucky for me, the placement of text onto this image was quite straightforward. There was a lot of negative space for me to work with. However, editing this photo was a little difficult. One of my friends noticed that the image was distorted, so I asked her to teach me to fix it.
Unfortunately, the quality of this photo was not great. I took this image from a still of one of the videos I recorded, and I did not have many good quality photos taken on my DSLR from my trips to Taiwan.
I tried to make the text margins follow the objects in the image and shifted the placement around a few times.
This picture was used on the cover of the book. Like with the previous photo, the quality is not very good because I took it from a still. However, because it was used on cover and ended up being covered for the most part by other objects, it ended up looking up okay. Furthermore, on the cover, the image was not the main focus, so the picture ended up being like a background with blurred effects.
Illustration
Even though my book was all photographs, I still really wanted to add illustration to the book. In addition to the previous art style I used in this art project, I also came up with the idea of using lines to make the photographs more interesting. I basically wanted to superimpose drawings on top of objects in the image.
Because I was unsure which of the two styles I wanted to use, I tried it out on the image above. After asking around, I got relatively positive feedback, so I decided to use this art style instead. I purposely made the lines slightly crooked to give the impression that the lines were hand drawn. I also talked with an instructor about how I should use the line art. After watching an airline demonstration video where this technique was used, I concluded that it was better to use the line art as a way of drawing a reader’s attention to something and maintain balance in the image.
I ended up redoing the line art of on this spread a few times. Throughout this process, I tried different stroke weights to add depth and importance to the image. After working out the first one, I applied similar techniques/strategies to the remaining spreads.
For this image, I decided to highlight the objects in focus: the pearl milk tea and the hand. At first, I circled the pearls (bubbles) in the tea only to realize that it looked a little strange. My design major friend suggested that I highlight the reflection of the pearls instead. (Spot the one pearl above that has this.) Because it looked a lot better, I did it with the rest of the pearls and outlined my hand as well.
In the Xiao Long Bao spread, I only outlined one of the buns. I also purposely made the lines a little off from the actual object to draw more attention to the object and highlight the shape of the food.
Out of all the illustrations I ended up doing, this one was by far the hardest. I had a hard time deciding what part of the image to focus on. I tried outlining the chair/table at one point, only for it to look quite strange. I decided to the highlight the beams on the right side of the page instead. During this process, I played around with the font weights, before settling on one uniform font weight for this image. I wanted to create a fading out effect with the strokes, but it did not work like I intended it to.
When I did the outlines on this spread, I was a little worried that the white would not stand out enough because the image has a lot of whiter colors in it. Again, my design friend pointed out that the shadows around the food were not as light as I thought they were. I decided to just outline the outside edge of the pile of taro balls in the image, and it ended up creating a nice effect.
This was my first attempt at the cover. The title did not stand out as much as I would have liked, so I talked to an instructor about different things I could try. At one point, I considered creating a collage of in the shape of Taiwan for the cover, but I ended up running out of time before I could attempt that. Furthermore, in some ways, I felt that did not match the line art theme going throughout the rest of the book.
As a result, I put in the shape of Taiwan that I had vectored in the beginning. I filled it with green (and tried out different shades of green) because it matched the background well. Initially, I made the shape opaque, but it detracted from the background. I decided to lower the opacity a bit to bring a balance between the image and the text. Lastly, I decided to throw in the skyline I created at the beginning of my iterations to add an extra fun touch.
Final Product
Reflection
This project was very challenging but tons of fun for me. I got to experiment with many things such as illustration and photo editing. The process was sometimes difficult as I would hit roadblocks, but everything worked out in the end. A few things I would change if I could:
- Better quality photos. I really did not have many good quality photos to work with. I also wish I was better at taking photos and took these in raws instead of trying to save space on my memory card.
- I wish I put more work into the illustrations in my final draft. There are a number of inconsistencies between each of the spreads. Some pages have a lot of illustration, while others have none.
- More meaningful order to the spreads. I didn’t have many photos to work with, so the photos were placed randomly. The photographic narrative could be more meaningful if the order was better.
- I’m not satisfied with the cover. The skyline at the bottom feels a little excessive?
Future Work: My brother suggested that I turn this book into an interactive parallax website. Once I collect more photos from other trips/places over the summer, I hope to create an interactive form of the book.
