OUGD404 STUDIO BRIEF 2 - STUDY TASK 2 DEVELOPMENT

Our task to complete before the next session was to choose one folding method and use it to produce a book about how to make a book using that folding method.

The method I chose was one which ended up having 2 spines which I thought was really interesting and produced a large amount of pages.

Chosen folding method.

To start off this project, I researched into small books, as I new the style of this had to be quite simple and the brief states it must be black and white, so I wanted to see what was already out there.

This booklet by Minji Cha breaks up the text using shapes and patterns. The text is black and white and simple, yet the shapes add vibrancy to the book. I cannot however include colour in my book, although the shapes could be useful to break up the text, providing I have enough free pages. The shapes are also geometrical which fits in well with the simplistic text pages.

These books use very simple imagery which creates a bold appearance. The typographic choices are also very effective, as a sans serif typeface, possibly Helvetica, adds to the simplistic effect. I also think that the breaking up of the text and image i=on the front covers is effective, as it adds to the geometrical style of these books, creating a clean break between the title of the book and the imagery itself. 

The Stud Book by Monica Drake cover was another inspiration for my book design, mainly in the cover of the book. For my book I don't want a cover that only has text on it, I wanted some sort of pattern as well to make it more interesting. This design really caught my eye as although it is pretty much just a white cover, the rabbits create an interesting pattern that is also a photograph as well, with gaps left especially for the text to go. I thought how the rabbits were all in close proximity with each other was what helped to create the pattern, rather the rabbits being spaced out and there only being half as many of them. This perhaps shows me that for my cover design a more close compact pattern would work better, especially on such a small book. I also liked how there didn't need to be any striking colour to the cover to make it stand out, I feel that is stands out sufficiently just by having no pattern, and the rabbits make you wonder why they're there, what they have to do with the book. I also like the hand written style of the text on the page, I feel it makes this cover look even more unusual, as if the text has been written on a massive sheet of paper and the rabbits let loose on it, and then photographed as a whole, which could well of been how it was produced in fact. The hand drawn text adds to the haphazard and chaotic style of the cover, however I don't think that this is a suitable style for my book as it must be clear and concise and easy to follow. I don't want people to get lost in it.

This cover by Guy Yani attracted my attention due to the alignment of the title text. There is more than enough space for the whole title to fit on just two lines, however one word of the title is placed on each line, perhaps a reference to the title itself, "fall", as the title falls down the page. I think the chunky black sans serif typeface works extremely well against the stark white background, making it stand out very boldly, despite the small point size of the title. I feel because of the simplicity of the cover, this book would also appeal to a more mature audience, which I kind of want my book to do too, however I want it more so to appeal to adults, but for the parents of children to teach their children how to make this book, rather than the parents making a book for themselves.

This book, Every Second and a Half by Henry Gibson, cover designed by John Divers, inspired me in a similar way to The Stud book did. With a compact black and white pattern covering the majority of the cover, with a little space for the title and author, I feel that this is a style that would rather well for the cover of my book, as the pattern would intrigue people to come and look at the book, yet the steps inside could still be as simple and concise as need be. With this cover though you can't really read the title at all from a distance, but I need the title of my book to stand out and be bold, so that people know what the book is all about.

After I had undergone my research, I set about making the pattern for the cover of my book. I wanted it to be bold and eye catching, yet I needed my title to stand out on the page and be easily read from a distance. This meant that my pattern needed to be compact and interesting, yet understated enough so my title stood out. I also wanted the pattern to be relevant to the content of my book, so I chose the most obvious image, of a book itself.

This is the photograph of a book I used to create my own image from, tracing over it using the pen tool on Illustrator. I chose this image because it was minimalistic yet bold, and would be easy to replicate and wouldn't loose any detail when shrank down to a small size.

As you can see I traced over the book and just left the fill option on rather than the outlines. I also chose not to include the lines of text, as I thought this would over complicate my design, and I wanted it to be as simple as possible.

To create my pattern I made the book using a light grey outline colour and a white fill, so that the outlines were still visible to create the pattern but wouldn't overpower the title. I chose a white fill as I didn't want to add too much colour to the pattern, as the title must be the focal point.

This is my final front cover for my book, using the font DIN Condensed Bold for the title and author's name. I applied the same alignment of the title as in the book design by John Divers, and I feel I have created my own pattern that is similar in style to The Stud Book and Every Second and a Half, in that it adds pattern and imagery to the cover, in neutral colours, yet allows the title to stand out, at least in The Stud Book's case for the title standing out. I chose the font DIN Condensed Bold for my cover as I though that it was bold yet simple, and I liked the elongated style of the letterforms, as it matched the slightly taller than standard paper sizes size of my book, and enhanced it as well, covering more of the page than a standard sized typeface would of done. I also didn't think that it was over complicated, with simple clean lines, yet it is slightly different to several sans serif typefaces such as Helvetica and Futura, as the letters are slightly rectangular, which can be seen especially in the "O", and also the "G", which I felt helped the title to fit within the rectangular cover better. I chose to have my cover text all in uppercase, as I wanted the title at least to be striking, and I thought that uppercase would work better at this than lowercase, as the letters appear shouting. However I also make the authors name uppercase as well, mainly just so that it matched the title better, and made the cover appear even.

This wasn't the first design I came to however, before I decided on a book pattern or created this final design, I undertook a range of experimentations into minimalist patterns and layouts of the cover.

Here you can see two slight variations of my final cover amongst several other different designs. My initial ideas for the cover of this book were for it to be striped, perhaps different stripes framing each part of the title, or each part of the cover, including the blank spaces. I thought that this would help to break the page up well, similarly to how the rest of the book is broken up into different steps. I tried horizontal lines in many different formats and sizes, however none of the looked right, they all just seemed a bit heavy handed. I tried vertical stripes which I felt made the book look like a woman's lingerie shop, as such shops use pink and white stripes for their advertising and promotions. I then tried diagonal lines, which looked ghastly, did nothing for the cover at all, they just looked like they were there for no purpose other than to fill a space. I then moved onto dotted vertical lines, which I think looks a little better, however now it looks more like beads dangling down from a doorway somewhere is Africa, which is not the look I was aiming for. For all of these design experimentations, I had been using the font Bodoni 72 smallcaps Book, as my original idea for my book was something maybe worn out a little by time, perhaps yellowed paper, and I felt a more traditional serif typeface may be more appropriate. However matched with the contemporary cover design it does not fit in well with the design of the cover at all, with clashing styles of traditional and contemporary. This is when I changed to a the bolder, much more contemporary DIN Condensed Bold typeface.

I experimented with the alignment and positioning of the title within the cover, and tried having "THE BOOK" all on one line instead, as I thought this could make a more aesthetically appealing cover, and fill the space on the cover better. However having the first two words on one lines makes the title read weirdly, it sounds as if it's being read "the book, making book" instead of "the book-making book". 

I also tried all the text to be centrally aligned, to match better the authors name which was originally centrally aligned, however the text looks too square down the middle in a line, there's no frame to the cover, and with the title flush left there is a frame to the page on one side at least.

Another design idea I tried was having the booking pattern with black outlines to make the pattern more obvious and bold, although the darkness of the pattern takes away from the title and the title becomes harder to read being camouflaged by the pattern.

To produce some of the illustrations in the book, I found photographs of these off the internet and either traced them using the pen tool (scissors), or used the photograph as a guideline (calculator).

Calculator

Scissors

These are the layouts page spreads for the book, which I found out which orientation each page has to be from my mock up, unfolding it and seeing which was round the page numbers were. To create the grid for this I used a series of square and found their midway points, and also divided the long edge of the paper by 3 using a calculator.

As you can see I divided the page by 3, producing a rectangle the correct size of a third of the width of the page. I then halved this rectangle twice to get each individual page size.

This is one side of my book, containing 10 pages including the front and back cover. I chose to use very simple illustrations to describe each step as I wanted each step to be clear and easy to understand. Also because of the small nature of this book, if the steps were too complicated and elaborate you wouldn't be able to understand what the steps were asking you to do. I was unsure what to put in the pages between the two spines, so at a last resort I just placed a large illustration of the book from my patterns, with a patterned background. I felt I could of included something better here, such as an inspiring quote about books or an interesting illustration of a tree maybe, however I took so long thinking about it than I ran out of time to do anything with it. I also forgot to include anything on the back cover as well, which isn't really important, but most books have at least something on the back cover besides imagery.

This is the second page to my book, where another 10 pages are shown. I used the same style illustrations on this side, to create a consistent appearance. I also chose to include an introduction, saying a little bit about what this book is actually about, a foreword to intrigue readers to carry on reading.

These are the photographs of my finished book. I chose to print it out on regular colour printer paper, as I thought that this weight of stock would be easy to fold and not too bulky. The white colour of the stock would also be in fitting with the simplistic, contemporary style of the book, anything slightly off white or textured may make the book look like something from a wedding or old fashioned.

Final front cover. As you can see the edge around the pattern is uneven, this is due to me having to scale down the file to print it, so everything was on a smaller scale, and a larger border left around the page. I then wasn't sure how much to cut the paper down on each side so that each page was exactly the same size. This resulted in slight errors such as these. Next time I should ensure I print on a larger piece of paper than needed, and include crop marks on where to cut. 

This is the back cover and a speak into the pages between the spines. I feel it is all very grey and samey. Needs more text and a different pattern I think, at least a different pattern for the pages between the spines, to make it a little unusual.

Some of the pages fold out, and yo can see this from this photograph. This provides for a little something different, and also perhaps having a photograph that spans 4 page spreads, which is unusual for a one piece of paper book. 

This is another example of a 4 page spread in my book, the centre of the book. I think that the illustrations appear clear and easy to read, and the simplicity of the design works well with the size of the pages. 

From this photograph the book looks just like any other ordinary book. I think that the introductory page provides an effective starting page for the book, and the "you will need" page ensures people have everything they need before they start making the book. Another problem with the printing however means that some of the page numbers are a little too far into the page, so they look like part of the page rather than page numbers, as you can see on the "you will need" page. 

For the content of the book I continued using the typeface DIN Condensed Bold, as I wanted the style of the book to be consistent from cover to cover, which meant using the same typeface. I also thought it produced bold titles for each step, and clear page numbers as well. There wasn't much body text in the book so there wasn't any necessity for a more delicate or lesser weighted typeface, except for possibly the introductory page where the body text does appear a little dense in comparison to the rest of the book.

FINAL CRITIQUE
I got some very motivating and useful feedback in the final critiques. It was suggested I should name the folding method, as nobody else had used it or even seen it before, so it could possibly be a whole new folding method I created. My peers commented how the folding out of the pages and the double spine was very interesting and unusual, making it different from the commonly used "hot dog" folding method. It was also said that the simplicity of my designs works well with the small size of my book, and people were also shocked how many pages I had managed to create from one piece of paper as well.