Create a physical magazine-style booklet for someone who knows nothing about your designer. How will you inform and delight them?
Sketching Flat Plans
Started out sketching rough ideas on a flat plan. Although I didn’t particularly like any one idea, I did find a scattered few ideas & visuals across the spreads that interested me. I’m excited to try out the layering of images in a way that transcends the individual page.
Hybrid Imagery Study
I borrowed a book from Hunt Library that was written by my designer, as a showcase of her work. Hybrid Imagery dives into her design ethos and creative process, so there’s a lot of good stuff to reference for typography and source images. I ran a few pages through the scanner for later use, so I could clip out images as needed in the future.
Polished Concepting
- Look for surprising moments in your imagery. Try to surprise the viewer, rather than have predictable layouts.
- Play with scale in your type and collage. Right now, everything is too large and similar in hierarchy.
- The timeline is interesting, but doesn’t play well with the rest of the page’s content.
- Take her work, cut it up, and make your own stuff from it- but use a captioning system to tie it back to her and allow the viewer to work through what they’re seeing.
- It’s alright to use a somewhat conservative type setting style, because your imagery will speak for you.
Currently, it feels like an impossible challenge to have to make so many collages unique and engaging. I probably have to
Single Iteration
- 2–3 doesn’t work very well. Don’t cheap out on imagery from the book. Trust your collage process and make your own imagery.
- Look to introduce a third/fourth degree of complexity into your spreads; they look a little flat and uninteresting at the moment.
- Redo the DIMS spread.
3/20 Process Reflection
(3:20 pm) This morning, I went back and scanned more images in. I ended up reading the book a little more closely in an attempt to better understand my designer’s work. One discovery I made was that I had overlooked her simpler, geometric shape-based work in favor of her maximalist collages. I think the key to success lies in integrating this simpler look into my booklet to balance scale and content in a more surprising way. Looking forward to seeing what comes out.
3/23 Progress
3/25 Process Reflection
(3:00pm) Starting to get a better feel of how to collage. I think I just needed to scan as many images as possible to have a large pool, rather than plan out images in an economic fashion. From here onwards, I’m looking to activate the body copy more and clean up all non-graphic components.
Crit notes: Start to nitpick and clean up the details. Hang your punctuation, check for double spaces, look at your sources. Activate the space on the conclusion page better; think about the spread as a combination of two pages. For printing, you might need to flatten the images and move some stuff around to get the blending modes to print properly. Don’t forget to include your credit line (sources, refs, Designed by Gary Tang)
Turns out I just needed to bite the bullet at scan as many images as possible. The sooner I had a large pool to work with, the easier it became to plan out and imagine the possibilities. One major breakthrough I had was learning how to distinguish which images/textures worked as backdrops, focal points, and supplementary detailing. I really started to find my stride with scale (both image and type), which allowed me to balance chaos with a clear sense of direction and movement in the spread.
Another major breakthrough was the captioning system. I originally put it off for last, but I think the captioning system really tied together everything once I implemented it. By linking all my assets through a small lettered list, I could introduce a level of depth that rewarded the reader’s keen eye.
3/27 Notes
Met with Brett to smooth out all the fine detailing in typesetting and citations. Printing is turning out to be a real pain; I might need to meet with Andrew to figure this out.
FINAL ITERATION (4/6)
(Not super jazzed about the printjob. Hopefully I can get a better one done for finals week.)
