Publishing Design | Task 3 A / Book

Week   | Week 
Mohamed Hammam Chebel (0342483) BDE's. Creative Media (Hons) 
Publishing Design 
Task 3A/ Book

Instructions

Layout References 

In week 05 class we were asked to look for references for book layouts, here are my references: 

Fig 1

Layout References

Determining Grids

Fig 2

Determining Grids

Type Specimen Sheet

Fig 3

Type specimen sheet

Three typefaces were chosen for the book

- Minion Pro (Bold, Italic, medium)

- Baskerville (Bold, Italic, Roman)

- Times new (Bold, Italic, Regular)

In the end, I chose to go with Baskerville for the headings, pull quotes, and subtexts.

Layout Design 

Fig 4

Layout design / First attempt

In this first attempt, you can see clearly that the with of the columns is inconsistent, after I received feedback from Mr. Vinod I chose a specific column width for the whole body text.

Fig 5

Layout design with grids, first attempt.

Fig 6

Layout design, updated after feedback with illustrations 

Fig 7

Book cover Layout.

Fig 8

Book, with cover PDF

After making the necessary corrections I added the book cover, and I added a shade of gray to some of the pages to create variation, I kept the black color of the body text against the gray background.

Fig 9

Book, thumbnails.

Fig 9.1

Book, thumbnails JPEG.

Fig 9.2

Book, thumbnails JPEG

Fig  10

Book cover spread, Layout

For the book cover, Mr. Vinod told me to make the title even bigger and move it to the right to readable.

Fig  11

 First page 

Fig  12

Final Book design Spread 1

Fig  13

Final Book design Spread 2

Fig  14

Final Book design Spread 3

Fig  15

Final Book design Spread 4

Fig  16

Final Book design Spread 5

Fig  17

Final Book design Spread 6

Fig  18

Final Book design Spread 7

Fig  19

Final Book design Spread 8

Fig 20

Final Book design Spread 9

Fig  21

Final Book design Spread 10

Fig  22

Final Book design Spread 11

Fig  23

Final Book design Spread 12

Fig  24

Final Book design Spread 13

Fig  25

Final Book design Spread 14

HTML5 Flipbook

Fig 2.1

Flipbook First attempt

Fig 2.2

Flipbook Final 

after feedback

Fig 2.3

Flipbook Final 

Week 14 - Added the Taylors Press logo to the book cover 

Feedback 

Week 06

- watch Youtube lectures (text formatting) 

- Format the text properly before proceeding with the design.

- get rid of the widows, rivers, and awkward spacings 

Week 07

- Please make sure your Feedback is updated. Ensure that Task 1 & 2 Eportfolios are complete for marking on Week 8 (ILW)

Week 08

- Public Holiday

Week 09

- complete the book

- add visuals, refer to form and movement exercises.

- add page numbers.

- Make sure that you make the page cove in a separate file and add it to the compilation PDF file.

Week 10

- Add a light shade of grey to the blank pages, use the grey from your artworks.

- You should have 32 pages including the book cover.

- make the book cover as spread layout in the thumbnail layout.

- try turning on hyphenate to a specific paragraph only and kern one phrase so you can get rid of the rivers in the body text.

- complete the blocks of text on page number 19.

- refer to #e_booknavigation on the Facebook group ad watch the tutorials.

Reflection 

Observation 

While doing the book project I noticed that there are important steps to take before proceeding with placing the text, at first I thought a book designer should only format and place textual information into a specific grid layout, but later on, I understood that there are many phases to go through, determining the grids, choosing a suitable typeface for the content, making relevant illustrations and placing them carefully, choosing interesting margin spacings, etc... 

Experience

In this project, I experienced few challenges, for example, the selection of the grid layout took me a long time, I kept looking into references trying to create my own layout, in the end, I used the Van De Graff method to determine the margins and some book layout references to determine the guides. 

Findings 

I found that I totally missed how to use In design software and how to format the text properly, so I made a lot of mistakes formatting the text, but after I got Mr. Vinod's feedback I watched the typography lectures he recorded in the previous semesters and applied all the things I learned, it helped me get faster at formatting text and playing with the software.

Further Reading 

I watched this YouTube documentary to get a glimpse of the process of bookmaking. I was interested in the history of bookmaking, how did people publish books when there was no technology?

I found this short documentary very informative and inspiring.