30 Jan 2017 — Useful feedback and thoughts from our (mini) exhibition at HOMISmart Milano
From The New Publishing to everyone!
Here we would like to document some experience we had during our first exhibition at HOMI Smart Milano, held on 27–30 January 2017. It is here that we would like to give a big thanks to HOMISmart and Relational Design that gave us this great opportunity to put on show our projects for the first time in public.
After 4 intensive days (and with 5 of our experiments stolen), theses are somethings we made, learned, and found during our days at the fair.
Visual Poetry — where we are now
As mentioned in the previous post, our process has brought our publishing house to print and publish visual poetry — a public domain poem with visual explanations (because the translations are also mostly licensed by the website).
The poem we choose to experiment is the Illiad by Homer. The reason is because the poem itself is short and not hard to explain. Also, it’s original language is in Greek, a ancient language that are perfect to explain the concept of what we are intending to do.
After a research on the visuals, we found that there are two possibilities:
Version 1 — Open sourced emoticons
Pictograms and emojis can be considered as a new and fun way of communication. It is being used widely in the realms of remote communication and social media to express feelings and thoughts, sometimes even more clear than texts (as it is once said, “A picture is worth a thousand words”.
Here we can find an open sourced emoji font that we can use to visualize our poem.
Version 2 — Open sourced images
Google image search provides us with possibilities to search for online images that are ‘labeled for reuse with modifications’. In there, there are several materials that we can use.
With these two possibilities, we then think that it would be great to try out both options to see which are the best option to go towards, and what are the possibilities of improvements. It is here also that it would be great to print and bind them both for people at the fair to see and give us comments.
Setting up the (mini) exhibition at HOMISmart Milano
Our site is quite different from what we previously imagined. As can be seen from the image above, it is much longer and is partitioned by a steel frame that holds together the exhibition table.
We then have to interpret and improvise our previous design to fit the current exhibition space we have.
Here, we place our experiments on the bottom line. It introduces people to our project slowly from the start up to our most recent experiment. The details of each of the main experiment findings are written on the white paper with fluor pink color as a shadow to highlight up the text.
Here are the main experiments we choose to exhibit.
1 / First book mockup — experimentation with format and text
2 / Postcard — experimentation with risograph printing technique
3 / The first chapter and the poem — experiments with font sizes, layout design, and production preparation
4 / The whole book (in A5 and A6) — Experimentation with binding, production time, and prices.
5 / Where we are now — a visual poetry, design and tested in 2 version
Above each experiments are our references. A collection of books, projects and people that we found along our way of trying to reach the goal (of printing and selling the book by the end of our thesis). They are exhibited in the forms of photocopies on colored papers.
In the original idea, we thought to our the computer with our landing page and a google form to ask people for feedback. However, in the end we didn’t do so because on the first day of the fair we didn’t have so much space to put our computer. We then decided that it could be a great idea to explain and exchange thoughts physically with people instead (also because of our product is physical and people can feel and touch them physically).
What we learned
Here are the collection of comments/suggestions/mistakes that we learned form the fair:
- We have to clearly explain our development
- What are the prices that we are going to sell them? What are the strategies?
- We could create and imagine an ideal book.
- We could find ways to link our book back to an online translation. Or are there ways to link users back to the poem and original translations of the website.
- What is considered new in our project? What are the innovation?
We would like to say thank you very much for these great comments. Some of the comments are very much urgent things that we have to fix and learn, and some we will sure to review them on after our masters graduation.
Our Next Step
Here are the list of things that we will intend to do and achieve by the end of the masters:
- Continue to develop and finalize the design of the poetry
- Make a series of 4–6 poems to make clear the direction of publishing house
- Set up and sell the book on social media (together with defining its price and distribution strategy)
Thank you very much and see you soon :-)
N. + S.
