Creative Book Design- Part Five: Production -Exercise 5: Reflective practice
Do you enjoy the creative freedom of working with your own text and images from scratch, or do you prefer working with text and images that are provided to you?
Do you prefer working in a ‘hands-on’ way, physically manipulating paper and materials, or do you prefer working digitally, laying out the pages and page elements on-screen? Which of the subjects covered in this unit have interested and engaged you?
I have enjoyed the creative freedom and more open ended tasks of the ‘Creative Book Design’ section. Going into book design with the first assignment being to create a book/magazine I was quite overwhelmed with the idea but after looking into work of many artists/designers I began to set myself parameters with working and found experimenting very enjoyable. In particular I liked researching designers, artists and collating inspiration in the form of images/quotes from various sources. I now have an even richer ‘bank’ of ideas and inspiration from furniture to magazines, finding many more great artists during this section. I found the work of Mike Mcquade (an illustrator/artist) throughout this section which has steered me further in the direction of collage and the synergy of physical and digital techniques. Earlier in the section I became more familiar with the works of David Carson and his early work/books which (going into the final assignment) are a big inspiration to me. Mario Picardo a graffiti artist from London’s work has also been influential, the gestural mark making and colours he uses within a magazine I own of his are great. A book my tutor suggested to me ‘An essay on typography by Eric Gyll’ was also very interesting. The book opened up the conversation of artist/artisan to me and the importance of method/context of everything you create.
Throughout this section (and especially in the previous exercise) I was able to experiment openly with various physical and digital techniques. I have learnt that even though I enjoy open ended questions that I struggle with deciding what to focus on and actually creating work as opposed to conceptualising multiple ideas and not ‘doing’. I have enjoyed many happy accidents during this section which drives me further to set myself parameters quickly and begin to work. I feel like I have neglected typography this section and probably haven’t experimented enough with just typography which is something I will focus on in the future. I would also like to focus on the physical side of book making; shape, paper, binding etc. Despite there being opportunities to do so I have dived in with the designs of the imagery as opposed to the physical book.
I wanted to create a hardback book and began by researching via Youtube.
I decided to produce a further screen-print in preparation for the final assignment. I tried this on multiple styles of paper, some normal A3 copy paper and Fabriano print making paper. When creating the screen there were some areas where the emulsion ran and wasn’t dried correctly which created white areas on the print. I quite like the texture of the final result but it is not as ‘clean’ as I had hoped.
I purchased some board and ‘heat n bond’ in order to create my own cover out of my chosen material. I then went onto creating the signatures by sewing and placing them together. I bonded the signatures with PVA glue, instead of a book press I used my desk drawer, which worked well.
I then used an old shirt which had an almost suede like material for the front cover. This worked quite well and had an interesting texture. I was relatively happy with my first hard back book but would definitely focus more on making sure that the signatures align perfectly as they were slightly off when stuck into the book.
I would also use different paper when trying this again as I used normal copy paper to not complicate things initially.
