Creative Book Design- Exercise 6: : Folding and mocking up your book
There are two elements to this exercise - thinking about how you produce your publication, and making a smaller scaled down version as a mock up.
Creating a small mock up Printers use large sheets of paper to print multiple pages, which are then cut and folded. You’re going to use a simple A4 sheet to recreate the process of imposition and folding into ‘sections’ or signatures at a smaller scale.
Fold an A4 sheet of paper in half, to create an A5 sheet. Now fold it in half again, so that you have an A6 size. This will comprise four leaves and eight pages. A page has a recto (facing) side and a verso (back) side. The terms recto and verso are also used to describe right-hand and left-hand pages in a double-page spread. With the sheets still folded, number the pages as they would read, from page 1, the front, through to page 8, the back. Now unfold the pages and notice how the numbers are distributed on the outspread sheet. This is a very rudimentary form of imposition, but the principle is essentially a miniature version of the same process within print production. By refolding your A4 sheet and then cutting the folded edges, you create pages, which can be stitched or stapled at the centre (gutter) to form a rudimentary book.
To create an A5 pamphlet with 16 pages take four A4 sheets together, and with the sheets positioned landscape, fold in half. Stitching or stapling on the fold will secure the sheets and form your publication.
Number each of your sixteen pages from front to back cover. Unpack the document and notice how the relationship of the numbers on the front and back of each sheet. For example, 1 and 16 should be alongside each other, with 2 and 15 on the reverse. These numbers dictate where your content will go, and how this content needs to be printed, and are known as ‘printers pairs’.
A simple way to approach this, is by taking the overall number of pages (often including the covers), and add one. So for your sixteen page booklet the magic number is 17. Go back to your mock up and add up your page numbers - each of your spreads should add to 17.
I hadn’t considered the physical creation of a book or magazine until this point. I was thinking along the terms of layout and page positioning. This task made me realise that there is a lot more to consider when in post laying out my zine.
The page numbers adding to your total number of pages +1 was interesting to think about. This will mean that in post I will have to arrange the content of page 1+16 together and so on. I may also have to adjust the composition of my design on the page to factor in the spine depending on the method I choose to bind the book.
I really enjoy the more tactile aesthetic of stapling the zine, but found when doing this with cheap paper it created a fold along the spine. I then took a look at a zine I had and at their method of stapling.
I noticed that they stapled directly into the middle of the spine, which allowed for the zine to be opened outwards fully, without creasing or damaging the pages. I was unsure of how this was done, so I took to youtube and found a great tutorial showing how this can be achieved using a rubber, and stapling into it.
This task has also made me realise the importance of the paper I decide to use. 2 of the zines I own are made from a very thin newspaper like material, and one is from a higher gsm paper. They are both able to achieve a well bound zine which pages don’t crease, whilst still looking tactile. This is something I will have to experiment with when considering my printing/binding method.
I began to consider different method of binding my zine, and continued to watch many more videos and tutorials of people sewing, hand stitching and gluing their books/magazines.
