Creative Book Design- Exercise 7: Visualising, editing and critiquing
Based on your work from the previous exercises, think about how your designs within the context of the book. For example, visually explore how your artwork sits within the format of your A5 pamphlet - how the page might frame the artwork, how different pages sit together or how you might begin to develop a narrative across multiple pages.
This process might suggest new ways of presenting or developing your work. Think about how you want to finish your artwork, whether this is through typography, illustration, photography, drawing or another format.
Critique your work - what has the format of the pamphlet offered you, how might your ideas develop further, and how has your understanding of creative book design changed through this exercise?
For the purposes of your first assignment, your book will be based on a simple, fanzine-like publication. For the production, you will need to consider how you print or reproduce your content, what sort of paper you can use, how you will bind it, and importantly, how many copies you will produce. Even with a very simple black and white photocopied publication, you will need to consider how your artwork, and the structure of your content fits, with this mode of production. In other words, what are the possibilities and limitations of photocopying, and how can your design approach and artwork accommodate these?
I had never used Indesign before so previous to beginning this task I watched many tutorials of Indesign and a few specific ones to designing magazines.
Indesign is a very sophisticated programme, combining the use of Photoshop and Illustrator. I looked back through the tasks I had completed, previous OCA tasks and my personal work and ‘threw’ them together to test with Indesign. This helped me gauge what style and direction I want my zine to go in. I have tested with various styles throughout the exercises and thought it was best to hone in on one, a few, or to at least see if the design styles are coherent within a zine layout.
I like the narrative (as well as books/what I have learnt etc) of ‘cut and paste.’ I feel like this represents taking inspiration from different areas of design, art, different books, what I have learnt so far, and putting it into a zine. When seeing some of the work side by side it shows how the different designs interact with each other and the negative space on the page. 2 designs next to each other that are large or fill the page doesn’t look as appealing as you don’t know where your attention should go. I have a few ideas I would like to expand on and test such as having any written reactions to the brief on one page and a response with an image next it. I will expand on these thoughts and test within the final assignment.
This task has allowed me to view my work in black and white in a zine layout. I have been attempting to create a narrative between them, critiquing which works and which ideas I would like to expand on, and which don’t work. I quite like the style of the ‘Typography’ letter collage in bold black and white, but it doesn’t have the same narrative as the other works, I think I may produce some other work in the style of this.
Through this task I have realised that the format of presenting my work is actually the most important and must be considered when designing. A lot of my work extends off of the page, this means that to create an A5 zine, it would have to be printed onto A3 paper and cut down. I planned initially to print my zine myself for a more tactile feel, thinking about this issue I will have to be careful when composing the designs on the pages if I include any designs such as this. I will have to do some test prints to see how they come out physically rather than just composed within Indesign.
Thinking about my preferred aesthetic and importantly the means in which I plan to produce my zine, using black and white is best. Inspired by ‘classic’ styles of fanzine I hope to include some more handwritten elements, and expand on other work/ideas produced from previous tasks. When considering paper I think of using a thicker, slightly textured style, but again I will have to produce some tests to see how well the paper prints, bend and folds into a booklet etc.
I decided to test printing with 2 kinds of paper, a thicker and textured, and normal printing paper. I expected the thicker paper to print better and overall create a better quality zine, but this wasn’t the case.
I began by printing 4 pages and quickly found out that my printing settings were incorrect. After some trial and error with these settings I found the correct ones.
I bound the pages using a stapler (using my new found stapling a rubber method to align the staples along the spine correctly) and quickly saw the difference between the normal printing paper and the thicker, textured paper.
The normal paper printed a better quality image, with less/no misprints, it was also easier to fold and held it’s shape better than the other paper. The thicker paper did not lay flat when places down as shown in the 3rd image and this was only using 4 sheets of paper. Another issue that I was aware of from my research but not to its severity was the alignment of the images in relationship to the fold in the page. The larger images especially were far from central, this will be something I will have to produce more test prints with trying different alignments etc.
