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| Initial ideas based on Bewdley itself was that is it very quintessentially British, if you think of a traditional British village/town, Bewdley is this. This idea could incorporate the British flag colours, red, white and blue, possibly producing the photographs in duo or mono tones, however this idea doesn't really have much depth. Another idea was to make it look hand crafted, as a lot of the signage in Bewdley was on chalk boards or etched into metal, which could be interesting to reflect in the style of the book. This could mean producing the book on recycled stock, with the emphasis on the more hand crafted letterforms, but also perhaps including some illustrations, of Bewdley itself or of the letterforms perhaps. The final idea was to create a minimalist nature book, as Bewdley is right in the countryside, with the river Severn flowing through it, and plenty of fields surrounding it. The inspiration for this was a book called Cabin Porn which is a beautiful book full of photographs of cabins in the countryside. It is a very contemporary book by it's minimalist layout, the focus being solely on the photographs, with text only to explain a type of cabin in more detail. For this idea recycled stock would work really effectively, emphasising the preservation of nature. The size of each page, to reflect nature could be quite tall, which reflects trees. |
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| The minimalist nature idea was one that really took hold, and there were so many things that could be applied to it which would be relevant to Bewdley and nature itself. Expanding on this idea, leaf prints, small illustrations of leaves, could be used as a pattern for the background on some of the pages, or to fill a blank page, or as the inside of the cover. The colour scheme would be green and brown particularly, but also perhaps orange and yellow, hinting at the autumn season we are in now. There are different binding methods that could be effective, the first being a hardback sleeve, which would give a more sturdy appearance to the book, reflecting the sturdiness of trees, with the actual hard back cover, behind the sleeve being made up of this leaf pattern. However the sleeve would have to be printed on high quality stock to create a high quality appearance that will match the effect the hard back cover has, which was prove tricky. Another option for binding could be a paperback sleeve, which would allow for the same inside cover being made of leaf patterns, with a photographic sleeve cover, however the need for such a high quality sleeve wouldn't be as important due to the paperback main cover, not reflecting as high quality appearance. This paperback option also allows experimentation with binding, a saddle stitch binding similar to some moleskin notebooks could work well, with brown or green thread used. The book would still be printed on recycled paper, no matter what the binding method, perhaps a similar kind to a previous brief, Save the Forest. There are also many different options for typeface choices, such as typewriter style to create a hand rendered effect, minimalist, to let the photographs have the focus, or a modern serif, similar to that used in the Cabin Porn book, specifically for the title, which reflects the age of nature, but it being brought back into the modern world. Experimentations will only tell which is most effective. |
Thinking about the style and concept of this book has really helped to focus my ideas and potential design decisions. This will allow for more focused research to take place, and layouts to be produced with these main aims in mind, rather than creating a whole bunch of page layouts to find out which works best and what style this is. The next stage in this brief is to research further into the Cabin Porn book, and other books similar to this, which their typical page layouts are, which kind of typefaces and how much text is used. This can then be applied to the photographs and content of this book, in a thought out manner.
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