21 Jan 2017 —Another step forward!
From The New Publishing to everyone!
Greetings from (a bit warmer) Milan! ;-)
Today we would like to update our recent meeting and discussions with our thesis advisor, Stefano Mirti, at IdLab. Here, to make it easier to understand, we divide the topics into ways that we are all familiar with — the five publishing steps.
Contents
After our most recent experiment at print club, we all agree that the A5 book is a bit too big. Also, printing the whole book would cost too much (either it is a digital printing or risograph).
The A6 books seems to be interesting. However, the price is still a bit too much (each book costs in average 3 euros if we print them in risograph, this mean in total the whole book would costs around 35 euros). Taking into account that what we are printing — Alice in Wonderland — is an old book that could be found anywhere, we are all not so convinced that anyone would buy them in such price.
Together, we then agree that it is very reasonable to change the content so that it’s shorter and easier to handle.
Based on the same criteria we selected for contents — the public domain titles — we then think that instead of printing literature (which is long and), we could instead print poems. This makes more sense for various reasons:
- It is shorter, hence solving the price problem of printing the complete title.
- Producing, managing, and designing them is alot faster (because the content is shorter)
After a quick look together, we find that there are alot of poems that we can print — from Greek, Chinese, Siamese, and much more. We just have to be sure to select a clear criteria to choose our content, and be sure about the license (especially those that are not english and we have to provide translations).
Edit
Choosing poem as our new content, we now have to keep in mind the translation — weather or not it contains license or if it’s correct.
One thing that we can think of now to solve this problem is (for now) we should stick with the poems in english version. Then later we can decide more about the ones that are in foreign or ancient language.
Design
Book Graphics
Since the content of the book is now changed to poem, the whole design concept of the book of our publishing house has to be changed.
Also, as mentioned before, now we have to concern about the images/illustrations that we will use to feature the poems.
Will it be from google? (the ones that are labeled for reuse with modifications) Or will it be from other open-sourced platform? (like open-sourced graphics or symbols) This we have to search and decide.
Book Format
Our primary decision to use the standard A-sized format is reasonable because the risograph machine works with this standard. But to take it further, Stefano suggests us to look into the golden ratio — the divine proportion that are believed and proven to be the most aesthetically pleasing to human eye. It is the proportion used by countless masters in the past to produce countless masterpieces.
Changing our book from standard A-sized format to the such proportion requires a little amount of work, but will definitely give us a very positive impact.
Visual Identity
There are some doubts regarding our previous developed logo, mainly on the digital glitch effect. The reason is since we work mainly with risograph, but the glitching represents more about the coding. Eventhough we could implement that the glitch represents digital, having this style together with the risograph graph style is a bit too much and busy.
The best way is to based our logo and identity on one clear direction. In this case the more promising one is the risograph style because our publishing house is (for now) based on this technique.
Regarding the typeface we choose — Roboto mono — we should consider having just one variety of font size in our design. One reason is because it makes the design less busy. Another is based on the meaning of monotype font, where each characters are occupying the same amount of horizontal space. In this sense, having different font sizes means different letter spacing, hence doesn’t comply to the original concept of the font.
Production
The production process would definitely change because we shifted our content to poetry. All and all, it will definitely be quicker and easier to manage. :-)
Distribution
After our decision about the production — selling by social media and e-commerce— we then drafted our plans and map on paper:
PICS
We then ask Stefano for suggestion. He suggests that the scheme is good and promising. However, the overall plan is a bit too complex and hard to execute. He then suggest us a more simplified version of the plan:
Here, a more simplified version:
Simply put, we must open and get active all social media channels. Then, all of them will lead the audience to the website, or even better, the e-commerce site that we are intending to sell our publications.
For the time being, the website must be easy to manage. Therefore, we can create only a landing page as a start, where it includes only one obvious button to buy the book (and of course, several small links to social media channels).
Regarding the instagram, he suggests us to use our private social account to communicate our activities on the publishing house. The reason is because we gain more audiences. In the contrary, if we open our own social account, it would take alot more effort to gain followers and visibility.
Here, he suggests us to use instagram stories because it gains alot visibilities and it says what we do at the moment. However, we must be sure to save the videos into our phone, or else it will be gone forever in 24 hours.
These should be somethings that we are able to manage and set-up by the time of our final degree show.
Other than these five topics, here are some additional important things that we talked about
HOMI Smart Participation
We are previously invited to participart in the new edition of HOMI Smart organized by HOMI Milano. It is a fair about lifestyle and modern living, organized at fiera milano. HOMI Smart, in particular, is a section about smart living where they invited companies and people that are related to future lifestyle.
We are invited as a part of Relational Design exhibition. It can be considered the first time we (physically) meet the public. It is a great idea that we should start connecting and show them our progress.
There is a possibility that we can continue to develop and evolve our project on site, where we can also ask visitors for suggestions and comments.
Final thesis book
For the final thesis book, we are planning to use our documentation as our thesis book. There, we can communicate our hypothesis, findings, references, thoughts, progress (up till now)
During the past months, we have documented our thoughts and progress through our medium account, our discussion on telegram, and references through google space.
Since the thesis book is about what we find and worked on, what we have now (the documentations) are the best resource for the book.
Since we have to submit a digital copy of our thesis book by 23 Jan 2017, we will (for now) rearrange contents find in our documentation so that it is organized and understandable by the readers.
Regarding the arrangements, here are some sketch that we talked about during the meeting.
We will keep you updated on our future progress
For now….. we have to continue our work ;-)
See you soon!
N.+S.
