Project 5: Documentation

My book was inspired by my cat Kudo. At first I wanted to create something similar to the taking care of my plants book that we saw in class.

Sketches

Early sketches I explored different ways to lay out text and pictures. It seemed “magazine-y”

Different inspirations

I really liked the style of Free People’s graphic design- how its handwriting over text. I really enjoy handlettering so I as thinking of doing handlettering overlaying the entire book. I also liked the idea of cut outs so having cut outs of handwriting and stars and doodles.

Iterations

I played around with the layout and this was kind of my first design. Breaking the grid is something that felt more “right” so I was not happy with this design.

I started gathering content by taking pictures as my spread layout. I didn’t really like how some of them turned out so I took indiviudal pictures of things and photoshopped them onto a spread. I began to play with font combinations — a serif for titles and sans serif for body.

This is when I starting adding more “handwriting styles”

I played around with different cover pages. Ideally I would have liked this cover but this photo quality was too low and my cat was not cooperating during our photoshoot and would not stay still.

Post Interim Crit

Some of the comments I received from the post interim crit was that the text was hard to read. They did like how the story was in his perspective (which I hadn’t decided on yet). So I wanted to explore different ways for the body text to be presented on the page. I played around with post-it notes and ripped paper and paint swatches.

People enjoyed the personality of my cat and I wanted that to be more apparent in the text so I changed the body text to a typeface called “Journal.”

Above is the typeface I used first. I decided to scrap this for a more “dry brush” feel. The font I chose felt too girly’/was more like me than it was like my cat.

Unfortunately some pages were cut like the grooming page and the dear reader page due to the 12 or 16 format.

I mapped out more ways to present my work. A lot of my iterations were based off the background image.

Final Design

Post Final Critique

I agree with the feedback I received. The body text was the most challenging part of my work. I had some problems with craftsmanship (still not great with the exacto knife… and fed ex kind of messed up my staple so I redid it and it still didn’t look great.) Overall I had a lot of fun working on this! My cat is excited that his book just got released. :)