Research task: Book terminology

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Familiarise yourself with the terminology used in describing the anatomy of a book and write some brief notes in your learning log on how the various structural elements could be modified to reflect the book’s function.

Book components

Andrew Haslam’s book – Book Design lists the components of a book as the following:

  • Spine section of a book cover that covers the bound edge
  • Headband narrow band of thread tied to the sections that are often coloured to complement the cover binding.
  • Hinge fold in endpaper between pastedown and flyleaf
  • Head square small protective flange at the top of the book created by the cover and backboards being larger than the book leaves
  • Front pastedown endpaper pasted down to the inside of the front board.
  • Cover thick paper or board that attaches to and protects the book block.
  • Foredge square small protective flange at the foredge of the book created by the cover and back
  • Front board cover board at the front of the book
  • The tail square small protective flange at the bottom of the book created by the cover and backboards being larger than the book leaves.
  • Endpaper leaves of thick paper used to cover the inside of the cover board and support the hinge. The outer leaf is the pastedown or board paper; the turning page is the flyleaf.
  • Head top of the book
  • Leaves individual bound paper or vellum sheets of two sides or pages recto and verso.
  • Back pastedown endpaper pasted down to the inside of the backboard
  • Back cover board at the back of the book block.
  • Foredge front edge of the book.
  • Turn-in paper or cloth edge that is folded from the outside to the inside of the covers.
  • Tail bottom of the book
  • Flyleaf the turning-page of endpaper
  • Foot bottom of the page
  • Signature folded sheet of printed paper bound in sequence to form the printed block.
  • Book block the main block of pages created when book pages are sewn or glued together before binding.

Elements that can be changed to reflect the book’s function

Cover and spine

The cover of a book can majorly affect people’s perception of the book and also assists in selling the book and its contents. The quality or value of the book will impact on the type cover the book will have, whether it is a hard-cover or paperback. The type of printing can also vary depending on the type of book. Artwork may be printed directly on to the cover of a paperback book whereas hardbacks may be foil-blocked, embossed or have the artwork on a dust-jacket.

Orientation and size

Depending on the books function the orientation may change. The dimensions of the book also depend on its function, if it is meant to be read in hand or on a table.

Headband

The thread could be changed to match or complement the cover.

Leaves

The type and makeup of the pages will depend on the books function. The heavier paper would mainly be used for books that are coffee table books or presentation books that are meant to be thumbed through and are too large or heavy to be held in hand. Paperbacks and novel are usually printed on thinner paper to make them lighter so they can be easily held and transported. Children’s books are often made of thicker paper or board to give them extra strength to protect them from the destructive power of the child.

Binding

How this is bound can change depending on the type of book whether it is stapled, sewn together or glued.

Layout, grids, margins and gutters

These all depend on the type of book. The layout varies depending on the function and so does the grid to an extent. Grids can alter the style of the book directing and leading the reader in the right direction. The margins and gutters also depend on the function of the book. Novels have thicker margins allowing the reader to hold the book without inhibiting the view of the type, whereas coffee table and reference books don’t need such wide margins as they are meant to be left open on a table as opposed to it being held in hand.

Reference

Book Design – Andrew Haslam

 

The function of books

Craig Roberts DesignLeave a comment

Identify a range of books that have fundamentally different functions in terms of how these books are engaged with – how they’re held, where they’re read, by whom, and for what purpose. Try to look at least six books, but you can extend this if you want to. The differences between these books might be determined by their genres. For example, you might look at a cookery book, a biography of a sports personality, a travel guide, a work of historical fiction, a teenage film tie-in like Twilight, this course guide – the choice is yours.

Think about how each book’s form reflects its function. The front cover is an obvious starting point (and the focus on your upcoming assignment) but try to look more broadly than this. Think about things like page extent, paper quality, typeface, the weight of the book, imagery and more. Is the book illustrated with photographs, reproduced images or drawings? Are these concentrated in one or two places or distributed throughout the book?

What about the front matter and end matter? Historical novels like Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall may have family trees and/or a list of characters as part of the front matter. A scholarly biography will usually have many pages of end-notes and references.

Reflect on this in your learning log, with examples of some of the books you’ve selected. Identify how each book designer has reflected the genre and function of your chosen books in their final design.

Function of books

All book genres share one common trait, an underlying grid that gives the book its structure and divides the page into areas that serve different purposes – columns, margins, headlines, footnotes, captions, illustrations and images. The size of the book is also crucial but is sometimes down to technical or marketing reasons. Novels should fit into your hands and have a narrow format for the type and have large margins where the reader can hold the book for long periods. Column width usually depends on how narrow the page is, the size of the type and the number of words or characters per line. Type for prolonged reading should be no smaller than 9pt or larger than 14pt if it is a ‘normal’ typeface, but alternate typeface may vary depending on its design. Some books use type in different styles and sizes to guide the reader around the page/publication. Larger books that are intended to be read casually or for reference can have smaller margins as they don’t need to be held for long periods. These will usually include images of some sort which often extend beyond the grid, sometimes to the edge of the grid/page. In larger books, the grid is a more flexible, fluid construct which can lead to varied and more interesting layouts. The type of publication also influences the layout of the book/page depending on the function of the book, whether its a recipe in a cookbook or a set of instructions for flat-pack furniture.

Books

The Body, a guide for occupants – Bill Bryson

 

Function – This book is a humorous look at the human body. It is set out in the form of a novel with each chapter being given to a different part of the body. It is also a reference book of sorts because it is informative about the functions of the human body plus specific ailments, drugs and medicines and finally death. This is not really a coffee table read due to its format and is design to be read like a novel.

Front Cover – The cover is a dust jacket wrapped around a plain, hard-backed book. The front cover gives the name of the book, its subheading and the author’s name. It has an illustrated cover based on a painting by Neil Gower who has illustrated the covers of many of Bill Bryson’s books and is credited in the back of the book. It has a matte finish except for the figure in the foreground and the type and parts of the illustration on the cover are embossed which gives a very tactile feel.

Page extent – This book has 456 pages and is quite a tome! But it does cover most things from conception to death.

Paper quality – The paper is fairly thin and is a yellowish/off-white colour consistent with most novels. There are also two sections of pictures in this book that are printed on thicker, glossier paper that is slightly whiter than the rest of the book. The first and last pages of the book are the same deep blue of the cover lining and are thicker than the rest of the book. The paper used in the book is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

Typeface – The cover is all sans-serif type including the review quotes on the back. The chapter titles are also sans-serif and are all uppercase. The body type of the book is fairly standard serif type (Bembo 11.75/14.5pt) which is easier to read in large blocks of type than sans-serif.

Weight of the book – For its size, the book isn’t that heavy and many smaller books weigh more.

Imagery – Each chapter has a black and white image with its title to illustrate the theme of the chapter. As mentioned above, there are two eight-page sections containing photos that are in colour, sepia and black and white of scientists, anatomical diagrams and medical procedures. There is also an image of the author inside the back cover.

Front matter – The book has two title pages, one with just the main title and one with the full title, author’s name and publisher name. There is a list of the author’s other books. There is a page containing publishing information and credits, copyright details and credits for other contributions. There is a dedication and a list of contents.

End matter – There is an extensive section on ‘Notes on sources’ which gives the sources for the facts used in the book which covers 30 pages. There is a 10-page bibliography, acknowledgements for help in collating the book and the pictures used. There is the index for quick reference and some notes about the author.

Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking – Maxime Bilet, Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young 

Function – This is a 6 volume, £350 cookbook! When I say cookbook, its not your average celebrity recipe book, this is more of a technical manual for molecular gastronomy. It covers everything from the history and fundamentals of cooking, through ingredients, to plated dishes. This is definitely a book for a professional chef rather than a home cook. It is presented in its own perspex case.

Front cover – The 6 volumes all have different covers but all share the same format. The title is at the top of each cover and the title of the volume at the bottom. Each cover has a large image on the front which corresponds to the theme of that particular volume and photographed by Nathan Myhrvold.

Page extent – In total, this has 2438 pages!!

Paper quality – The paper quality is very high, as you would expect in a book of this price. The pages are glossy and fairly thick even in the kitchen manual.

Typeface – The cover typeface looks like it is something like Eurostile for both the title and the subheading. The typeface used inside for the majority of the text is a serif typeface.

Weight of the book – It weighs 18kg in all. It’s definitely not a book you can carry around with you. It is a book for display and to reference rather than read on the train.

Imagery – This book contains some amazing photographs to illustrate the ingredients and techniques used in the recipes. Nathan Myhrvold’s techniques include cutaways of the food cooking in pans to amazing close-ups of the structure of ingredients. The images range in shape and size including whole-page imagery. There are photographs on nearly every page in volumes 1 to 5, but volume 6 is purely recipe and technical information and has no imagery other than on the cover.

Front Matter – Inside the cover each book has a glossy double-page photo. This then leads to a spread containing the copyright information and the book title and authors. Then there is a contents list followed by a page with the volume title. All of these pages contain the glossy images that appear throughout the book.

End matter – The rear of the books contain a glossary of the terms used in the books which cover on average 20+ pages, but this is dwarfed by the index which has several different ways of listing the contents to make it easy for the reader to find what they’re looking for whether it is by ingredient or by cooking method.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K Dick

Function – A fictional novel by the renowned sci-fi author Philip K Dick. This book is meant to be read over time in a relaxed format. First published in 1968 there have been many incarnations, this particular version was printed in 2007.

Front cover – The cover is an image of a sheep that has been zoomed in to give it a halftone look. It also is reminiscent of pointillism in the way you can see the image dots. There is the name of the author, the title of the book and a quote from English author Brian W Aldiss. The cover has a gloss finish and the dots are embossed which makes the book very tactile.

Page extent – This book has 224 pages which aren’t that many for a novel.

Paper quality – The paper in this book is of your standard off-white paper you would associate with novels of this type. There is a statement on one of the first pages that the paper is from sustainable sources. There is no paper lining the inside of this cover.

Typeface – On the cover and back cover all of the type is sans-serif. The author’s name takes president on the cover in a typeface called Conthrax Bold as far as I can tell. The main body type of the book is a serif typeface and the chapter numbers are sans-serif. As well as the page numbers the book’s title and the author’s name also appear on each spread.

Weight of the book – The book is fairly light and could easily be carried in a bag or large pocket, it would also make this book easy to hold while reading.

Imagery – Other than the image on the front cover there is no other imagery.

Front Matter – There are several pages in the front of the book before the story starts. There is a page with quotes and reviews about the author and his genre of writing; The is a bibliography of Dick’s work; a title page with the book’s title, author’s name and publisher’s logo; a page with all of the copyright information, ISBN numbers and publishing information; there is a dedication with a quote by Yeats; there is a quote from Reuters news agency from 1966 about the death of a 200-year-old Tongan turtle.

End matter – At the back of the book there are just two pages of end matter, one with a short bio about the author and another advertising the publishing house.

Gigantosaurus – Jonny Duddle

Function – This is a children’s book aimed at primary aged children and is meant to be a fun read while also being educational. It is a fairly large book and is not meant to be transported far but it isn’t too thick so can easily be read on a tabletop as well as on a knee with a parent.

Front cover – The cover is a full-page illustration of the four main protagonists of the story. The author’s name is also worked into the illustration. The title of the book is also sort of forms part of the image and is embossed and foiled to make it stand out and give it an interesting feel for the reader and it has a gloss finish.

Page extent – This book is 36 pages long, one of which has a fold-out section. All the pages contain some sort of illustration and type including inside the cover.

Paper quality –  The cover is a thin card and the inside pages are of a fairly thick stock of paper which has a matte finish.

Typeface – The author’s name on the cover is hand-drawn and the title has been distorted from an existing typeface. The type of the story itself is meant to look handwritten but I couldn’t identify what it was. Parts of the story are done with the type in speech bubbles. There is also some LARGE type used to represent loud noises in the story.

Weight of the book – The book is very light as it’s meant for young children and isn’t exactly War and Peace!

Imagery – The book is illustrated by the author in so much detail and with such fun. The illustrations help tell the story and the fold-out page gives an element of interaction. The illustrations cover the whole of the page which help maintain the flow of the story and keep the reader interested.

Front matter – The inside of the cover is illustrated and contains short reviews including one from the author’s daughter. There is then a title page containing just the name of the book. Then there is a double-page illustration of the lead characters. The next spread contains a dedication and the publishing information as well as the title, author and publisher’s logo.

End matter – In the rear of the book there are two illustrated double-page spreads with information about dinosaurs featured in the book and educating the reader. Inside the back cover shows some of the author’s other books.

The Ipplepen Magazine

Function – This is the monthly village magazine. Its function is to keep the residents of the village informed on local matters and events in and around the village (There are 2 pages about the weather!?!). It is also a place to advertise for local firms and this is how the magazine is funded. It recently went full colour on the front cover and is printed at the printers that I visited while studying GD Core Concepts.

Front Cover – As previously said, the cover has recently gone full colour. It usually has a seasonally appropriate photograph on the cover. There is the title which is partly in colour to match the image, the date and the sub-heading underneath the image.

Page extent – 52 as the front and back cover are numbered as pages.

Paper quality – The pages are probably 80-100 gsm and the cover is slightly thicker and is bound with a couple of staples.

Typeface – The cover has 3 typefaces. The main title is in IKANSEEYOUALL All of you by Swiss Typefaces. The other typeface in the title I couldn’t identify. The date and the subheading on the cover are in a sans-serif typeface. This sans-serif typeface is used for the body type in the rest of the magazine. Other typefaces are used within individual adverts in the publication. The type has quite large leading to aid in reading it.

Weight of the book – The book is very light and easy to carry, which helps with the delivery of the magazine and the ability to get it through a letterbox. It would also be helpful for some of the predominantly elderly villagers who may not have the strength to hold anything heavier for any length of time.

Imagery – Other than the image on the front cover, there aren’t any specific images relating to the publication itself but there are images that pertain to specific articles or are part of one of the adverts.

Front Matter – The first page(page 3) gives information about the magazine such as the editor, the treasurer and the distributer. There is also a list of useful phone numbers for local residents and details of the printers.

End matter – The rear of the magazine contains useful diary dates for the coming month of events, clubs and groups.

David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

Function – This is a novel by one of the world’s most famous authors. It was published by Everyman’s Library in 1907. It is pocket-sized so that it can be taken and read anywhere by anyone.

Everyman’s Library was founded on 15th February 1906 with the publication by Joseph Dent (1849–1926) of fifty titles. Dent, a master bookbinder turned publisher, was a classic Victorian autodidact. The tenth child of a Darlington house-painter, he had left school at thirteen, and arrived in London with a half-crown in his pocket. He promised to publish new and beautiful editions of the world’s classics at one shilling a volume, ‘to appeal to every kind of reader: the worker, the student, the cultured man, the child, the man and the woman’ so that ‘for a few shillings the reader may have a whole bookshelf of the immortals; for five pounds (which will procure him a hundred volumes) a man may be intellectually rich for life’. ‘Infinite riches in a little room’, as he also put it.

Source: Everyman’s Library

Front cover – The cover is a hard-cover and is embossed with a crest reading Dent and Sons, but other than this is plain. Whether this book originally had a dust-jacket as the Everyman website has the image below:

Abstract wood-engraved ornaments by Eric Ravillios

Source: Everyman’s Library

The spine has the title, author, publisher and printer written in gold along with some art nouveau decoration.

Page extent – There are 823 pages in the book.

Paper quality – The pages in this book is very thin. It is almost like tracing paper in that you can almost read the type on the next page.

Typeface – The title and some of the art inside seems to be some sort of version of Caslon. The main body type of the book appears to be Baskerville and is difficult to read as it is in very small point size.

Weight of the book – The book is quite light considering it is 800+ pages due to the thin paper used. This would also aid in being held, read and carried by its reader.

Imagery – The only imagery in this book is inside the covers where there is some art nouveau decoration with the company’s motto “Everyman I will go with thee & be thy guide in thy most need to go by thy side”. There is also a double-page spread with more art nouveau detailing and the title of the book and a quote by Sir Philip Sidney, an Elizabethan poet. There could have been some imagery on the dust-cover.

Front matter – There is a page containing the title, publisher, author and the person responsible for the introduction. The next page contains information on the services provided by Everyman’s Library including the types of books they sold and the different types of binding available. The art nouveau double-page spread mentioned above comes next and then information on the printing edition. There is then a 16-page introduction and bibliography, followed by a preface and contents list.

End matter – There is only one page at the rear of the book and this details where the book was printed.

Reflection

This was an interesting exercise. It made me look at things that you take for granted and don’t really pay much attention to while reading a book. It also made me think about the function of the book. What is the book designed to do? What is it trying to tell me? It made me think of how the book was meant to be read, on your lap? in bed? or is it a coffee table read? It was really nice to have access to books that dated from the beginning of the last century to the present day to compare the different features and the evolution of the book.

 

Assignment 1: Your zine

Craig Roberts DesignLeave a comment

“An intimacy derives from the fact that fanzines remain amateur, ‘handmade’ productions operating outside mainstream publishing conventions and mass-production processes. The hand – the imprint – of the individual producer or maker is readily evident in the fanzine itself. This suggests, then, that the history of the object is bound up not only with the history of fanzines more generally but also with the history of the individual maker.”

Teal Triggs, Fanzines, 2010. London: Thames & Hudson. Page 206.

Your first assignment asks you to create a small publication or fanzine based on your interest in books and their design. It allows you to introduce yourself, and your interests in book design, so that your tutor can get to know you and your work better.

Your fanzine can be digitally printed, photocopied or handmade. Aim to design a sixteen-page simple folded and stapled A5 fanzine, though you can add more pages, or change the scale if you want to. You can use any medium or materials to generate your artwork and make your publication. You may want to work much larger and reduce your artwork for the fanzine. While visually it doesn’t have to look like a punk fanzine, try and embrace the lo-fi ‘cut and paste’ attitude, so you’re making the work relatively quickly and not too preciously. Be creative with this task both in terms of the content and how you choose to present it, this could extend to challenging some of the assumptions about what a fanzine should look like, or how it’s made.

Use the work you have produced so far, in the earlier exercises, as a starting point for your content. Not all of this material needs to be included in your fanzine. You may want to develop new visual ideas or add to the work you have already produced.

As a guide, your fanzine should contain the following elements:

  • Introduce yourself – say something about your relationship with books. Why are they important to you? Communicate this through writing and images.
  • Your creative process – how do you like to work creatively, what sort of process do you follow to research and generate ideas, and what are your preferred mediums to work in. Say something about you as a creative practitioner and your approach. Show your approach to book design through your design decisions and the hands-on sense of immediacy and energy that is an attribute of fanzine design.
  • Looking at books – present the most interesting books you’ve looked at, or those you find influential as a reader, designer or both? Present a selection of books, or focus on one particular example to present in more depth. Think about how you can present these books, and your reflections, in visually engaging ways.
  • Global influences – which books with a wide-reaching scientific, artistic, historical, political, geographic, fictional, poetic, religious or other impact have you chosen. Present them along with a brief rationale as to why, or how these books have affected you personally. Again, can your designs echo the ideas in these books in any way?
  • The future of the book – where do you see the book heading? Show and tell. Try and summarise your thinking into a series of short statements, quotations, images or ideas. Be creative in how you approach this.
  • How can you creatively respond to one or more of the following book-related sayings – Bookworms, A closed/open book, The oldest trick in the book, You can’t judge a book by its cover, In someone’s good/bad books, or, by the book. Use your fanzine to present your ideas. Can any of your images, text or ideas also feed into your cover designs?

Using your learning log

Keep notes to accompany the making of the publication in your learning log. These notes could cover why you decided to portray what you did, what you included and what you omitted. See it as a way to document and reflect on your creative design process.

Remember that this is an opportunity to experiment with your ideas, so document your creative process, the various stages of your work, and any ideas you rejected along the way. Aim to do this visually by photographing, scanning or taking screenshots of your work in progress and sharing them in your learning log.

As your first book, there’s room to make mistakes, take creative risks and enjoy the creative process, so don’t worry too much about getting it ‘right’. If your visual research takes you away from the above categories, that’s fine, after all, they are just prompts to start the dialogue about your interest in book design.

Design

I really wanted to keep my design in keeping with the work I’d already produced, in particular the book-phrase exercise.

So I started with the cover of the zine. I wanted to recreate some of the experimental typography inspired by Roy Cranston. So I set up an A4 document and divided it in two for the front and back covers of the zine. I used the words my zine as the title and laid it out on the cover of the zine using a similar style to the one I’d used for the previous exercise. I added a few linear elements to the design and allowed it to spill over onto the back cover.

Screenshot 2020-02-15 at 21.15.49

I was quite happy with this but it felt a little flat, it needed more depth and texture. I then thought about how this was to be reproduced. It occurred to me that most zines are crudely reproduced by either printing or photocopying, so I decided to add one of the photocopy textures I had stored on my computer as well as a grainy texture to give it that rough-around-the-edges look.

Screenshot 2020-02-14 at 20.07.13

This was a lot more along the lines of what I had in mind. I could carry this theme throughout the whole zine.

So then I turned my attention to the interior. The only problem I envisaged with the interior was that the criteria listed in the brief were only enough to cover six of the seven spreads. Somehow I would have to split one exercise over two spreads. I thought that the book-phrase exercise was probably the best to split over the two spreads as this exercise had the most usable material to enable it to cover both spreads.

The first spread was to be from the exercise Influential books. I didn’t want to use the exercise verbatim but wanted to illustrate the exercise in some way. As I was restricted to digital reproduction due to some building work at home I wanted to recreate the low-tech approach which was common in zine production. I chose to take excerpts from the exercise and replicate them as cut-out pieces of text. These were placed on top of an image of some dusty, old books that I found while researching that exercise. Again I overlaid the image with the photocopy and grainy texture.

Screenshot 2020-02-14 at 20.07.35

I wanted to keep the typefaces down to a minimum so as not to make the designs too chaotic. I decided to stick to Helvetica and American Typewriter for use throughout the zine to give it some continuity. I also wanted to give each spread a title that would relate to its subject.

Screenshot 2020-02-14 at 20.07.49

In this spread, I used some type from the actual exercise which I reversed out of some darker boxes to help with the clarity. I also used some of my own mind-maps in the background. I know that you shouldn’t spread type across the spine of the book as this makes it harder to read, but as I was already trying to use experimental typography so I thought why not break some more rules!

Screenshot 2020-02-14 at 20.08.02

Book cover designs interest me. I do prefer minimal book covers or ones that a clever twist on the title. I struggled with this spread on how to approach it. I eventually settled for creating cuttings of some book covers I like and adding a comment to each of why I like that particular book, whether it is fiction or non-fiction. I also added a bit of micro type to add some interest to the design with the definition of the word judging.

Screenshot 2020-02-14 at 20.08.18 The spread of books that have a worldwide influence was another page that wasn’t based on a particular exercise. I decided to pick six books, and the original idea was to have the books on a world map. I also wanted to start adding colour into the designs the nearer I got to the back pages. As the next page was going to be my future book image which has an offset printing style I decided to replicate the colours on this spread. The only title I could think of for this page was Book World, but couldn’t think of a way to incorporate it. I eventually decided to drop the word World as this was depicted in the map and dropped the word Book in behind. When I picked my six books I hadn’t considered where the authors lived geographically because I wanted to represent them on the map, however, four of mine were English! I didn’t let this worry me too much and gave the books a rough geographical location pertaining to their authors. Again, I broke the rules with the type but it was in keeping with the rest of the zine.

Screenshot 2020-02-14 at 20.08.29

This was the easiest page of all to sort out. I had already created it as a double-page spread in the exercise so I just dropped it straight in. The only downside is that the type is a little small which makes it hard to read.

The next spread was the mystery one. So I decided to spread the book-phrase exercise over the final two spreads. The first spread would be the info on the exercise and the second spread would be the image of the final design.

Screenshot 2020-02-14 at 20.08.44

This time I called the spread Turning Tricks. I used the imagery from my research for the exercise as the backdrop which I rendered in colour and black and white. This time I placed excerpts from the exercise in black type on white backgrounds and I aligned the type blocks with the calling cards of the background.

Screenshot 2020-02-14 at 20.08.55

The final spread was now simple enough. I just used the final image from the exercise and again added a grainy texture and the photocopy effect.

Once my designs were finalised I went on to print my zine using my home printer. I had to paginate my designs before printing them out which took some getting my head around!

Screenshot 2020-02-16 at 21.50.00

Then I printed it out double-sided, which added another level of difficulty, but I eventually sorted.

Once trimmed I stapled my zine and was pleasantly surprised at the way it had turned out.

I then went on to do a digital mockup for my zine to show it in its full glory.

Screenshot 2020-02-14 at 21.33.52

Reflection

This assignment took me out of my comfort zone. I wasn’t sure how to approach this and it took me a while to get into it. Once I found the direction to take this in it all kind of came together and began to flow. Taking inspiration from the last exercise gave me a starting point for the style of my zine which then made it easier to work through the rest of the assignment. Once I’d got my spreads sorted I then paginated them which was a new skill for me to get my head around and now feel that I understand it a little better as a pre-print process. Due to unforeseen circumstances that prevented me from doing a completely low-tech approach I was still able to produce a physical version of my zine which helped with understanding the pagination. I did try to give the zine a handmade feel to appear low-tech even though the majority of the work was digital. Overall I’m happy with the result considering I didn’t know where to start.

Sources

Wikipedia.org

Pinterest.com

Pexels.com

 

Alternative publications

Craig Roberts DesignLeave a comment

Using your research into artists’ books and fanzines as a starting point, think about their physical or design qualities, and creatively apply some of these approaches to your own designs.

For example, there’s a distinctive visual quality to many fanzines which comes from a ‘cut and paste’ approach to designing and through the use of cheap photocopying and printing. Punk fanzines, in particular, make a virtue out of having limited resources, no computers and little, or no, formal training as graphic designers. Use your sketchbooks to experiment with a similar ‘cut and paste’ approach by cutting and collaging magazines and other material. What does this approach offer you as a book designer?

Alternatively, you can find other ideas you would like to test out in your sketchbook. You don’t need to make any finished designs, just give yourself room to experiment and try things out.

Research

This exercise immediately made me think of some of the stuff David Carson does.

Image result for david carson instagram

Image result for david carson raygun

David Carson is a prominent contemporary graphic designer and art director. His unconventional and experimental graphic style revolutionized the graphic designing scene in America during the 1990s. He was the art director of the magazine Ray Gun, in which he introduced the innovative typographies and distinct layouts. He is claimed to be the godfather of ‘grunge typography’ which he employed perpetually in his magazine issues.

Source: famousgraphicdesigners.org

It also brought to mind another artist I like called Chris Ashworth who also worked on Ray Gun with David Carson.

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Chris Ashworth is an English graphic designerknown for being the executive global creative director for Getty Images and the art director of the magazine Ray Gun in 1997. In addition to his work on Ray Gun, Ashworth also created the brochure and promotional materials for the first MTV Europe Music Awards in collaboration with John Warwicker and Simon Taylor. His work on the brochures earned him more work with MTV, as well as work with Warner Music Group and Image Bank.

Source: Wikipedia

I follow both on Instagram and they are both very active. They often posting collage-style images that are made using stuff they find and Letraset type and I am very envious of their Letraset collections.

What I could find…

So, due to a lot of governing factors, my offline work environment has been limited and I was restricted to what was within arms reach of my desk. However, I was surprised with what I had lying around and started cutting out random bits of type from things like paper bags, Amazon boxes and paperwork from my day job. I wanted to see if I could create something from everyday stuff that was lying around my limited temporary environment.

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Lacking Mr. Carson’s Letraset collection I used what I had to try and make something aesthetically pleasing. I spent some time trying various different layouts until I found an arrangement that I liked.

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The design isn’t anything in particular but the arrangement is pleasing to the eye due to the way the different elements are aligned and layered on top of one another.

Reflection

This exercise was a tricky one to get right for logistical reasons beyond my control. Initially, I wasn’t sure how I was going to complete it with the limited resources at my disposal and wasn’t very enthused by it. But after researching and taking a leaf out of Mr. Carson’s book I took the bull by the horns and used what I had to hand to try and create something impulsive and fast-paced while retaining the homemade zine look. I decided to use one of David Carson’s mantras and go with the flow.

“For some reason, I have a visual intuition that allows me to design things in an interesting way, and I don’t know where that came from. Because I don’t have this formal training, I seem to drift in a different direction.”
– David Carson

This exercise has given me an insight into trying an unorthodox low-tech approach to creating a piece of work and that is visually pleasing but the subject isn’t necessarily obvious.

Visualising, editing and critiquing

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Based on your work from the previous exercises, think about how your designs within the context of the book. For example, visually explore how your artwork sits within the format of your A5 pamphlet – how the page might frame the artwork, how different pages sit together or how you might begin to develop a narrative across multiple pages.

This process might suggest new ways of presenting or developing your work. Think about how you want to finish your artwork, whether this is through typography, illustration, photography, drawing or another format.

Critique your work – what has the format of the pamphlet offered you, how might your ideas develop further, and how has your understanding of creative book design changed through this exercise?

Production

As a designer, you need to have an understanding of the processes involved in creating a book. Some of these processes remain essentially the same as in early books, for example, folding paper to form pages and binding these together to form a spine. The spine, like our own backbone, is structurally significant in that it holds the pages of the book together and allows us to open and read the pages.

For the purposes of your first assignment, your book will be based on a simple, fanzine-like publication. For the production, you will need to consider how you print or reproduce your content, what sort of paper you can use, how you will bind it, and importantly, how many copies you will produce. Even with a very simple black and white photocopied publication, you will need to consider how your artwork, and the structure of your content fits, with this mode of production. In other words, what are the possibilities and limitations of photocopying, and how can your design approach and artwork accommodate these?

Previous exercises

Of the previous exercises I hadn’t thought about them appearing in the zine that is to be produced in the first assignment. Saying that, the piece I produced in the exercise ‘The Future Book’ lent itself to being a double page spread and would sit very well in a portrait zine. It could be used as a single page in a landscape version but I don’t think it would be very legible at that size. Also it would need to be printed in full colour as I’m not sure it would portray the same message or have the same impact in black and white.

Future-book

The piece I did for the exercise ‘Research and development’ I’d always thought of it as a book cover. However, as a piece in a zine it begs the question whether to use the mockup or just the image? The type used in the exercise could be very impactful if repeated on other parts of the zine. Again, depending on the format of the zine the image could be used as part of an article or as an image in its own right or perhaps the background? This particular image would work well when reproduced in colour and black and white due to its bold, high contrast imagery and type. Or could the image be reproduced using coloured paper with the black and white image over the top?

 

Reflection

Prior to this exercise I had considered my work from the previous exercises a singular pieces of work, but this exercise has made me think more about how they could be used in the form of articles in a zine. Now I am viewing my work as a whole in the form of the zine for assignment 1. I think some of my work lends itself to being used as is in the zine while other pieces may work as images within an article. It’s also worth bearing in mind the bleed of the images as the reproduction methods may not be as accurate to full scale printing. This can all be explored in the development of the zine in assignment 1.

Folding and mocking up your book

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There are two elements to this exercise – thinking about how you produce your publication, and making a smaller scaled down version as a mock up.

Creating a small mock up

Printers use large sheets of paper to print multiple pages, which are then cut and folded. You’re going to use a simple A4 sheet to recreate the process of imposition and folding into ‘sections’ or signatures at a smaller scale.

Fold an A4 sheet of paper in half, to create an A5 sheet. Now fold it in half again, so that you have an A6 size. This will comprise four leaves and eight pages. A page has a recto (facing) side and a verso (back) side. The terms recto and verso are also used to describe right-hand and left-hand pages in a double-page spread. With the sheets still folded, number the pages as they would read, from page 1, the front, through to page 8, the back. Now unfold the pages and notice how the numbers are distributed on the outspread sheet. This is a very rudimentary form of imposition, but the principle is essentially a miniature version of the same process within print production. By refolding your A4 sheet and then cutting the folded edges, you create pages, which can be stitched or stapled at the centre (gutter) to form a rudimentary book.

Books are constructed from folded sheets in this way, each one of which creates a signature. A signature is a section made up from a folded sheet which will create pages when guillotined. Signatures are built up in 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 or 128 pages then stacked up in sequence and glued or stitched (or both) across the back edge to form the book block, which is then bound to the cover.

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Creating a full scale mockup

To create an A5 pamphlet with 16 pages take four A4 sheets together, and with the sheets positioned landscape, fold in half. Stitching or stapling on the fold will secure the sheets and form your publication.

Additional pages can be added, but there is a finite number that can be slotted together before you notice how the folded pages start to stick out from the non-folded edge. This can be remedied by trimming the edges of your pages. For professional book designers working on large publications, this process needs to be taken through binding choices, and carefully adjusting page designs across the whole document.

Number each of your sixteen pages from front to back cover. Unpack the document and notice how the relationship of the numbers on the front and back of each sheet. For example, 1 and 16 should be alongside each other, with 2 and 15 on the reverse. These numbers dictate where your content will go, and how this content needs to be printed, and are known as ‘printers pairs’.

Translating your DTP artwork, which has been produced in chronological order, 1-16, into the format needed to print your publication, is known as pagination. Commercially, printers often undertake this work, but as designers, it is also useful to understand how pagination works.

A simple way to approach this, is by taking the overall number of pages (often including the covers), and add one. So for your sixteen page booklet the magic number is 17. Go back to your mock up and add up your page numbers – each of your spreads should add to 17.

Critiquing and editing

Making decisions about which of your designs are the strongest is an important part of the creative process. Thinking about your designs within the context of a book can help spark new ideas, so the critiquing and editing of your work can initiate the start of a new creative process. With this in mind, don’t leave reviewing your work to the very end. It’s a good idea to test out your ideas within a book format as you go. This might mean seeing how your work is framed within a book’s borders, how content sits alongside each other on the spread of different pages, summarising your ideas down to essentials forms, or seeing how the turn of the page might start to build a narrative from one idea to the next.

Folding

In the previous module(GD Core Concepts) I had created a brochure for my final project. I created this in InDesign which lays out the document as spreads rather than it being paginated, but my visit to the printers had given me an insight into the preprint process of how PDFs pages rather than spreads are individually placed in their paginated format before printing. However, I didn’t fully understand this until I did this exercise which helped to illustrate the basics of page layout. It’s nice to also help familiarise myself with the terminology used in printing.

Small mockup

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Full size mockup

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Reflection

This exercise has given me a new perspective of thinking of a book as a whole and how it can be laid out as a whole document(book) as opposed to a series of separate pages which aren’t necessarily in the order you would think!

Research and development

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Firstly, review your visual ideas based on from the previous exercise through a process of critical evaluation. Which ideas are you drawn to? Which ideas have ‘legs’ – possible interesting outcomes which are worth pursuing? Often the ideas which are strongest are those which have depth, or many layers of association. Perhaps you are intuitively drawn to a particular idea. Select a few ideas you would like to push further. Use your learning log to record your thoughts.

Now, do you need to undertake any research to help move your selected ideas on? The form your research will take depends on the individual elements of your idea. Find source material that helps informs your ideas. For example, by doing objective drawings or taking photographs, to understand your subject better, and to consider aspects of composition. You can use both primary and secondary sources of research in this way. Research feeds into the development of your visual work, informing and advancing your ideas. Document this phase of the work accordingly.

The developing your ideas stage is about building on your initial ideas by reworking them, adding the visual or other insights gathered through your research, and testing out different versions or possibilities. Spend 45 minutes developing the possibilities of one of your ideas. How many different ways can you visualise this?

If you want to develop a broader range of ideas, then repeat the previous exercise to generate more possibilities, potentially using a different phrase as a starting point. Use your learning log to document this process of review, research and development.

Visualising your ideas is the culmination of all your preliminary work in which you work up some more developed visual sketches and ideas. This artwork can be hand-drawn illustrations, photographs, and/or include typography. The presentation can be a little rough around the edges but should show the main elements of your designs. Select the strongest variation of your ideas from the previous research and development exercise to start exploring how you can visualise them within a mock-up.

Use your learning log to document these research and development stages, and to reflect on the process and your results.

Review

Looking at the thumbnails and ideas from the last exercise and contrary to my initial thought “The oldest trick in the book” had, what I thought, generated to more interesting and less cliché ideas. I thought that the link between the word ‘trick’ and its link to the oldest profession. Whether this would be to red light or the more seedy side of the business, I need to do some more research into the subject and how the terms ‘oldest profession’ and ‘trick’ to generate some ideas and see whether an innocent take on the subject or more salubrious imagery would be best.

 

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Research

I started with the phrase ‘oldest profession’ and tried to find its origin. I found that the phrase referring to prostitution is a recent one:

The oldest profession in the world (or the world’s oldest profession) is a phrase that, unless another meaning is specified, refers to prostitution. However, it did not acquire that meaning universally until after World War I. Formerly, various professions vied for the reputation of being the oldest.

Source: Wikipedia

This was a surprise to me as I assumed that the phrase had been around for a lot longer. However, this didn’t deter me from pursuing this course. The next logical step was to look at the actual history of prostitution.

Prostitution, the practice of engaging in relatively indiscriminate sexual activity, in general with someone who is not a spouse or a friend, in exchange for immediate payment in money or other valuables. Prostitutes may be female or male or transgender, and prostitution may entail heterosexual or homosexual activity, but historically most prostitutes have been women and most clients men.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica

I then looked up the actual meaning of ‘oldest trick in the book’:

Said to mean that people should have expected something dishonest or unfair that someone has done because it is a very common or obvious thing to do

“Well, that’s the oldest trick in the book” – to blame someone else for your problems.

Source: Collins Dictionary

What is the history of the term ‘Red light’?
While the moniker ‘Red Light District’ is most readily associated with Amsterdam, historically the term refers to any city district known for being a den of vice. ‘Red Light District’ became shorthand for areas with high concentrations of sex workers in the 19th century when brothel-owners began to use red gas lights to discreetly alert potential customers to the true nature of their business.
I also curated a Pinterest board of images that might prove useful.
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The search for imagery took me in various directions from the red light itself to imagery of prostitutes. But the most interesting images I found were images of calling cards in phone boxes. These reminded me of the fanzines in their hand drawn and low quality production.
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Developing ideas

From my research a few things caught my eye. Some of the images on my Pinterest board looked promising. However, I didn’t have any idea of how to use them! I also wanted to keep the red light in there somewhere too, whether that be the colour or using the lamp imagery. Images that stood out to me from my research were:

I went back to Procreate…

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Of these ideas I liked the imagery of the prostitute with the eyes blacked out, the calling cards and the prostitute being picked up by a car. I wasn’t sure which to use so I thought I would try and combine them. I moved into Photoshop to see what I could do.

Visualizing ideas

The first thing I wanted to do was to try and recreate the halftone effect of one of the images I had found on Pinterest. I used an image of a man picking up a prostitute in his car and changed the image mode to bitmap and played with the settings until I was satisfied with the result. I then recreated another element from my research and blacked-out the eyes of both figures.

 

It then needed some colour. I added a pink/red background colour, but the image wasn’t as clear with the background colour. So I added a white box behind the halftone image but in front of the background.

I liked the way this was looking. It had that fanzine/homemade feel. I now needed some type.

I have recently been following an artist called Roy Cranston. He uses a lot of experimental typography which looks irregular and distinctive and I thought it would would work well for this cover.

The shadows of the car in the image gave a great vertical axis to work with which I lined up with the black box covering the woman’s eyes.

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I added the title of the book in good old Helvetica in different weights and sizes and also distorted it by duplicating parts of the type using the marquee tool and offsetting them.

With the type added, the design looked a little unbalanced so I decided to add some more black bars. I aligned these these with the text and the original black bars.

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At this point I was happy with the way it was looking apart from the flat pink/red areas. Initially I put a picture of red light district windows behind but I didn’t like it. I then tried it with the calling card collage behind and that was the one.

I was really happy with the design and decided to ask for feedback from my peers. The feedback was mostly positive with only one concern about the word ‘book’ being too close to the bottom of the page when it came to printing.

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I went on to mock it up as a book cover.

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Conclusion

I am surprised where this exercise took me. I initially wasn’t that taken with this exercise and found it hard to get going. However, once I had some inspiration and imagery to work from I enjoyed it and I hope that this shows in the final piece.

Generating ideas

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Use one or more of the following book related sayings as a starting point to generate visual ideas and responses:

  • Bookworms
  • A closed/open book
  • The oldest trick in the book
  • You can’t judge a book by its cover
  • In someone’s good/bad books
  • By the book

During this early formative stage, aim to be as wide-ranging and imaginative as possible in your ideas. ALL ideas are valid at this point, so don’t censor; this is not the stage to decide what is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ idea – at this point they are all just ‘ideas’ with equal merit. Let one idea flow fluidly, intuitively and organically into another to make unexpected links and associations. Record your thought processes and ideas using thumbnail sketches, spidergrams and annotations.

Thumbnail sketches are a way of recording ideas through quick pen or pencil line drawings. The quality of the drawing is not important; a drawing of a person does not need to be anatomically accurate, for example. The drawing serves as a visual reminder to you of a fleeting idea. Aim to make thumbnail drawings in the same quick way that you make short written annotations – keeping up with the flow of your ideas. Draw a range of visual and conceptual possibilities using the book sayings as your starting point. Aim to spend 45 minutes working on this, generating as much content, potential ideas, thumbnails, visual metaphors or imagined books as possible.

Thumbnails can give an indication of composition and art direction. For example, how does the subject sit in the frame? How is the subject lit? What particular attributes does that subject have? Thumbnail sketches, along with annotations, are a good starting point to begin exploring these aspects.

Choices

I picked a couple of the titles to play with – You can’t judge a book by its cover and The oldest trick in the book. 

As this was meant to be a quick exercise I got straight into mind-mapping and sketching out a few ideas on the iPad using Procreate.

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This one seemed to easier to generate than the next. I think by spending more time on the exercise more ideas may have been possible.

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The second verbal cue I found harder than the first. The mind-mapping didn’t generate as many ideas but I felt that the thumbnails were better then the first lot, but this could be because I spent more time on these.

Reflection

This exercise refreshed some of the skills covered in previous modules. Generating ideas quickly is an effort for me as I do tend to mull things over before commiting. The 45 minute time limit really makes you concentrate and forces you to work quickly and put any and all of your ideas onto paper. I find mind-mapping is a useful tool to generate ideas that aren’t obvious and can be on a tangent to the original brief which can make the end product a lot more interesting.

Research task: Artists’ books and fanzines

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Browse the American based Smithsonian Libraries’ Artist Book archive to identify books that you find interesting or questions the notion of the book in some way.

https://library.si.edu/collection/artists-books

Explore fanzines in more depth by reading Teal Trigg’s chapter Definitions and early days (pages 6–43) from her book Fanzines: A do-it-yourself revolution (2010). This chapter is available as a course resource on the student site.

Document visual examples of work you find interesting with annotations in your learning log. You’ll be using some of this research in your first assignment.

Artists’ books

These are a phenomenon that I haven’t encountered before. I found them very unusual in that they weren’t what you would conventionally call a book. They made me question what a book was? According to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, a book can be either a ‘portable written or printed treatise filling a number of sheets fastened together’ or a ‘literary composition that would fill a set of sheets’. The Encyclopedia Britannica gives 2 more descriptions as either ‘a written (or printed) message of considerable length, meant for public circulation and recorded on materials that are light yet durable enough to afford comparatively easy portability’ or an ‘instrument of communication’ (Encyclopedia Britannica I 1964, vol. III, p. 870). Geoffrey Ashall Glaister gives the book value in The Encyclopedia of the Book 1996 in that he describes it as ‘for statistical purposes the British book trade once assumed that a book was a publication costing sixpence or more’ and ‘other countries define a book as containing a minimum number of pages; a UNESCO conference in 1950 defined a book as “a non-periodical literary publication covering 49 or more pages, not counting the covers”.’ Andrew Haslam gives his own description of a book in Book Design as ‘a portable container consisting of a series of printed and bound pages that preserves, announces, expounds, and transmits knowledge to a literate readership across time and space.’

I liked the description of a book as a container of some kind. A container for words. Containers come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and there’s no reason why this couldn’t apply to books. This is what I feel that artists books are – various interestingly shaped word/message containers.

Of the artists’ books in the Smithsonian the following caught my eye:

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Description: “a geometric story by Esther K. Smith from a wood block pattern by Dikko Faust”–Colophon. Folded accordion style, with 9 panels.

This one caught my eye because of its simple geometric design that seems to evolve into a more and more complex shape. It reminded me a little of Bauhaus and also Victorian/Georgian mosaic tiled floors.

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Description: “This the fourth in a series of tunnel books, each depicting beloved views”–Colophon.

The pages of this book create the layers of the scene. Each one with different details on it that when put together form the whole picture. The separate pages/layers give the image its depth.

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Description: “Each of the three titles in the Seeing trilogy is in an edition of 25”–Accompanying pamphlet (“75books”).Limited ed. of 25 boxed sets.Issued in a case, 16 x 14 x 16 cm.

This is made to look like an old camera and I can only assume that the book is to be viewed through the ‘camera lens’ so that everything in the periphery is obscured and your view is focused on the book pages.

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Description: “Inspired by a conversation about how a person translates their life experience into a narrative form: prominent events may stand out as the nameable moments, yet it is the space between these events that life, in fact, is lived.”–Vamp & Tramp Booksellers website.”Created and produced by Julie Chen and Barbara Tetenbaum. Julie: sleeve text, image and design. Barb: card text, image and design. Julie and Barb: binding design. Printed letterpress from hand-set type, wire, antique news cuts, dingbats and photopolymer plates.”–Colophon.

Limited ed. of 100 numbered and signed copies.

“The mid-century photo album structure contains text written by Chen … Her text is printed on both surfaces of each of the 15 hinged sleeves. Windows in the sleeves reveal small glimpses of the pull-out cards, each written and printed by Tetenbaum and containing dates and events of the non-important moments of her life. These texts are supported by diagrams, grids, and mundane imagery.”–Vamp & Tramp Booksellers website.

“Pages formed by envelope sleeves open-ended on right. Each sleeve with miniature square window cutouts, and no sleeve with the same cutout pattern. In the form of a tablet with overlapping staggered 7.5 x 3.5″ pages. Sleeve enclosure is attached to box of cloth-covered boards with title tipped on front. Signed by both artists”–Vamp & Tramp Booksellers website.

Issued in cloth-covered drop-spine box with letterpress-printed title collaged onto the front of the box.

AAPGAB 39088016101180 has limited ed. copy no. 64 of 100.

AAPGAB copy 39088016101180 has bookplate: Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Gift from Margery Masinter Foundation Endowment for Illustrated Books.

I liked the way that this book was as much about what you could see as what you can’t. The cards’ position gives you an insight into the mundane elements of the artist’s life without giving you the whole story which draws you in further.

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Description: In 28 x 23 cm. box with wooden inserts by Nichols Woodworking.

“Texts printed were excerpted from [several] sources and used with permission”–P. [73].

“An edition of sixty letterpress copies”–Colophon.

“First and last sections of the book are collated consistently; the middle four signatures vary. Each copy is unique. Bound by Emily K. Larned, the book is sewn onto cords attached to sanded plexiglas covers”–Colophon.

AAPGAB copy 39088010098333 is no. 56.

With this one, I liked the way that the artists had printed on paper over previously printed works. It reminded me of some of Roy Cranston or David Carson’s’ work where they reuse material in their designs.

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Description: Accordion fold, offset printing, Malmero Perla paper; a metallic acid-free paper portfolio with two laser cut walnut page holders. Includes instruction sheet.

AAPGAB copy 39088016913071 gift from Susan R. Frampton.

This is another creative use of the book in that you can project the images on to a wall by shining a torch through them. Each page is accompanied by a short excerpt of text. These are beautifully cut images that I am sure would create a very striking story.

SIL-95-391

Description: An artist’s book, with a structure based on the wishing stars (lucky stars) from Hong Kong.Cover title.

Publisher and date of copyright from colophon; possible place of publication from label on box.

Consists of one continuous strip of paper (5 x 64 cm.) printed on both sides in black and gold and folded into a pentagonal shape (9 cm.), inside which five small colored paper wishing stars (1-2 cm.) are hidden.

“Handset in Centaur, letterpress printed on Mohawk and written and designed by Katherine Ng …” –Colophon.

I picked this one purely because of its unusual shape which stood out from all of the other artists’ books I’d seen. A very clever and beautiful origami solution.

Zines

Fanzines were something I had little knowledge of. The only thing that came to mind at first was some of the underground punk publications of the 70s and 80s but I had nothing specific. I then went on to read the suggested chapter from Teal Trigg’s book. I had no idea that fanzines had such a rich history and were the basis for many modern day publications and had been the start of so many well known people’s careers. Other than music, I hadn’t realised that so many other genres had their own zines. I would imagine that if there is an interest in something, there is probably a zine about it.

Zine characteristics were that they were focussed on a particular subject; they displayed characteristics of being homemade and not mass-produced; they didn’t conform to the rules of typography and layout; they were often anti the establishment; they were unofficial; they often used mixed media and they used imagery as much as they did type to convey their message.

The punk-style zine gave itself to the Sex Pistols when they hit the mainstream and needed a style for their publicity and album/single covers.

london-outrage-fanzine-by-jon-savageNever_Mind_the_Bollocks,_Here's_the_Sex_Pistols

Some zines that I found stood out to me…

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I liked the cut and paste look of these and they reminded me of some of David Carson’s work for Raygun magazine in the 90s and were possibly an influence for his work. I liked the idea of reusing other pieces of type/images to create new ones.

I liked the use of overprinting to introduce colour to this selection of zine covers. Budget was obviously a little higher on these as the printing costs would be higher. These possibly had a larger readership in order to justify the costs.

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I couldn’t resist getting a Star Trek reference in here! Spockanalia was first printed in 1967 and was the first Trek-only fanzine printed just a year after the show’s launch. These types of fanzines gave fans a voice and were often a way of communicating directly with the writers and stars as well as other like-minded fans. Stories, artwork, letters and poems could be submitted by fans on their chosen subject (not necessarily Star Trek).

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Full colour fanzines are now easier than ever to produce thanks to technology and this perfectly lends itself to comic book fanzines but could be used for any subject and can be a lot more designed and refined.

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Conclusion

Before beginning this task I knew very little about artists’ books or fanzines and their origins and uses. I now have a better understanding of the subjects and understand their place within book design and graphic design as a whole and how they have contributed to its development.

The Future Book

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“Whenever I hear the word ‘reader’, I reach for my mobile device. Today’s ‘reader’ is as likely to be a digital apparatus or software interface as a living person leafing through the pages of a book. Countless hardware and software products are designed to display, filter, push, and aggregate published matter. Screen readers turn text into speech, creating accessible material for sight-impaired users. News readers digest blogs and news posts, feeding them back to users in quick-view formats stripped of context, while digital readers serve up books and magazines for instant consumption.”

Ellen Lupton, Graphic Design: Now in production, 2014. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Given the current development of the book from printed to digital technologies, what do you see as the future of the book, for readers, and book designers? Where do you see the book heading? Show and tell. Try and summarise your thinking into a series of short statements, quotations, images (collage) or ideas. Be creative in how you approach this. Use your learning log to reflect on the essay and your own thoughts and visual ideas about the future of book design. This research will feed into part of your first assignment.

Research

I began by seeing what I could find out about the history of print as well as the implications of digital media on the print industry. I printed out the chapter of the suggested book plus the section on new technology in Book Design by Andrew Haslam. I also found a couple of very interesting articles on the internet regarding the demise of the printed book and the effects of reading using technology.

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The design

My initial thoughts on this exercise were that it was a straightforward research exercise and had to conduct the research and write my opinion on the subject. However, I then wondered if I could depict it in a visual way.

I wanted to depict both sides of the issue, both pro-book and pro-e-reader. I wanted to use print imagery and imagery of digital readers and tech references. The irony of designing something about the future of the printed book on a computer while trying to make it look printed wasn’t lost on me and I wanted to use this in my design too. I envisioned a black and white background with some offset print effects over the top for colour.

I began by setting out my A3 canvas in a 12 x 12 grid to give from to my layout. I wanted a background image of some dusty, old books and found an image on Pinterest that I thought would be suitable. Initially I wanted the image to cover the whole background but this didn’t look right and reduced the size and placed it on the canvas with plenty of white space around it which was much more appealing. Next, in reference to Peter James’ publication of his novel Hook on floppy disc, I used vector image of a disc and overprinted it on top of the photograph in print colours and offset them all slightly. I added a blur to soften the edges of the vector so it didn’t look as harsh. I then added the type which I reversed out of the image. I stacked the letters to make it more interesting for the reader. This was also blurred slightly. I added some more images to give the piece more depth, these included an image of a Kindle e-reader, some binary code representing the digitization of books, some printers’ registration marks and a download icon. It was at this point I thought that it needed some more type. I added the title and mocked-up 300 words of filler-type and then asked for some feedback from my peers. The feedback was positive, but it was suggested that it needed more colour to balance the piece as the discs were the only bit of colour. Following this I went back and changed the title to reflect the overprint effect of the floppy discs. I also rearranged the letters to compliment the stacked letters in the centre. I then replaced the filler-type with a small summary of what I had researched in the books and online articles previously mentioned. I finally decided to add a background to the piece and chose to make it look as if it had been printed in a book to add to the irony and juxtaposition of the conflicting arguments for and against the digitization of books.

Future-book

Conclusion

This exercise challenged me in that I initially couldn’t see the creative answer that I came up with. However, once I had started on the route of designing something visual I really enjoyed it. I’m very happy with the final piece and once I took onboard the feedback to add more colour to the design it made the design more balanced and more interesting. As mentioned in the above paragraph, I enjoyed the humour and irony of the piece and I hope that this shows through in my design.

Resources

Chapter 7: The Future of the Book from David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery’s An Introduction to Book History (2005).

Book Design by Andrew Haslam

www.bbc.com/future/article/20160124-are-paper-books-really-disappearing

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/science-explains-why-the-printed-word-is-still-more-powerful-than-digital_uk

flaticon.com

Pinterest.com

goodereader.com

 

Feedback

 

The feedback from my tutor was positive for this exercise. However, she did highlight that it was unclear where the ‘future’ of books was covered. This was a valid point as I hadn’t really covered much past books today. This got me thinking about where books would go in the future with the continued digitisation of books and more people turning to audio books. Ironically this then led me to books I read as a child which had some form of interaction. I remember having some ‘Choose your own adventure’ books which gave you options to choose the direction of the story.

The Haunted House by R.A. Montgomery
Source: goodreads.com

Could this be a possible direction for books to go in the future? This idea was covered recently in the Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror episode ‘Bandersnatch’ which gave the viewer control of the storyline.

An image of Stefan Butler in profile, with his head outlined by twenty circular ripples. The poster says: A Black Mirror Event. Bandersnatch.
Source: wikipedia.org

With AR tech becoming more and more prevalent these days, could books be given immersive feel by using the technology to put you into the book? I found a great article at thebookseller.com about how AR technology is of major interest to publishing companies.

Source: thebookseller.com