Your final assignment asks you to draw on all the skills, insight and experience you have gained so far, by designing and producing a book of your choice. Use the following options to as a starting point or alternatively identify your own project.
● Influential book designers
Identify one or more book designers to present through your book. Find ways to develop your own creative responses to their ideas and visual approaches. Delve into their work, find suitable quotations, investigate their influences, and find ways of communicating this material, and your interpretation of it, to an audience through effective use of layout, narrative, and choices of material.
● Typography
Extend your exploration of typography by continuing to develop creative approaches to how typography, layout and your material choices can help generate meaning. Develop a book that explores one aspect of typography in more detail, or combines a variety of approaches. Just because your project explores typography it doesn’t mean you can’t also include images, colour and narrative.
● Found and altered books
Use an existing book as a creative starting point. This could be an extension of exploring altering books in some way, or as a research project into a specific book that will generate content and creative ideas for a new book. Find a physical book to work with or pick one of your influential books from Part One.
Research the subject in depth and think about the editorial structure (described in Part Three) of your book. What is the flow of the content, would you write articles or create imagery or both? What do you want to tell about the subject and how would you communicate this? And who is your audience? Make a flatplan before you start designing your book, and have a look at other books on the subject to see a different design approach on the subject. You may want to look at the work of designers you inspired by, in order to develop your own design approaches.
You may have identified an alternative area you wish to pursue. This is fine as long as you check this out with your tutor first and document the reason(s) for your choice.
Follow the creative design process in developing your creative thinking and how you will approach the workflow, in terms of content and timescale. Decide on your subject and start researching, creating content, editing content, making decisions about the materials you want to use, and designing your book. Frame this process within an overview of your workflow to help plan the production of your book. Planning the process of generating content, and how this can then be
developed, is key to successfully finishing a designed physical book. Keep notes to accompany the process of making of the book in your learning log, and reflect on your design process.
You can use any medium or materials you want to in the production of your book. You may want to research and explore hand-binding, or work digitally with print on demand for production. You may want to combine these approaches and you may want to consider whether you want to produce a one-off copy or a small edition. If you would like to use a particular paper for your book, make print proofs before printing the whole final book. Test the paper, the colours and how your design works on the paper.
Explore the materiality of books in more depth by considering the paper, printing and bookbinding of books, both as content and form. Think about how books are held, interacted with, and the associations of the materials you might use. Explore how these choices can start to create meaning within your book.
Reflection
Give yourself a final self assessment check against your assessment criteria to see how well you think you’ve done. Use this process to help reflect on your work and your achievements on the course as a while. It will also help to identify to you and your tutor any areas you may need to work on prior to submitting for assessment.
Sharing your work
Digital companies such as blurb.com have an online ‘sharing’ facility – this would be a useful way for your tutor to see the whole work without the need for expensive mail costs.
My choice
For my choice for the final assignment was an easy choice for me. I wanted to do something in and around typography, but I wasn’t initially sure which direction to take.
I started by mind-mapping a few things to se if anything jumped out at me.
I had so many directions to choose from when it came to typography. Should I use all or focus on just one? I started making some notes to see if that focused my thoughts a little better.
This actually confused the matter even more! I had given myself ‘too many’ choices of what to include in my book. I needed to hone my ideas down, as I thought that I needed to specialise.
As well as trying to find a niche for my book I began collecting some inspiration via Pinterest. I already had a well establish typography board to draw from, but I also started a layout board to collate images of interesting layouts or layout elements.
I also found this video on YouTube which I thought was fun.
After mulling over what direction to go in for this assignment I had managed to whittle it down to 3 ideas:
- Different styles of type
- Type designers
- History of typography
I am fairly familiar with the different classifications of type, and I had done some work around type history in my previous module: Graphic Design Core Concepts. So this left type designers…..decision made.
So now I could write myself a brief…
Having a clear direction and an actual brief helped focus my ideas and I was able to begin the design process.
Design
Firstly I needed a list of designers. I hit the books and scoured the net to find a list of suspects. The most useful tool I found was my copy of ‘A Visual History of Type by Paul McNeil‘. It covers 320 of the most influential typefaces of the last 500+ years.
I worked my way through the book and picked out some of the typefaces that I personally thought were important and listed who designed them.
A couple of the typefaces I had chosen didn’t have specific designers which was a little disappointing and some of the designers had very little information about them. I wrote these off with one exception: Akzidenz Grotesk which was the basis for Helvetica, which was too important not to include.
I eventually got the list down to 18 designers:
- Johannes Gutenberg – Gutenberg
- William Caxton – Caxton
- Claude Garamond – Garamond
- John Baskerville – Baskerville
- Firmin Didot – Didot
- Giambattista Bodoni – Bodoni
- Robert Besley – Clarendon
- Berthold Akzidenz – Akzidenz Grotesk
- Morris Fuller-Benton – Franklin Gothic
- Paul Renner – Futura
- Eric Gill – Gill Sans
- Stanley Morrison – Times New Roman
- Howard Kettler – Courier
- Max Miedinger – Helvetica
- Jan Tschichold – Sabon
- Carol Twombley – Myriad
- Eric Spikermann – FF Meta
- Tobias Frere-Jones – Gotham
My 18 designers fitted neatly into 6 time periods(by design) which were to be my 6 chapters. Technically this was only 18 pages unless they were all to be double-page spreads. This needed some more thought.
I decided to move on to the format of the book. What type of book would this be? Referring back to the brief, I had identified the audience as people who would specifically be interested in typography and its history. Therefore, I felt that the book would be some sort of coffee table read with a high-end feel, something that people would want to pick up and browse through. It had to be tactile and eye-catching. This would be achieved by the choice of finishes for the book.
I had started to sketch out page layouts in a traditional portrait format based on my Pinterest research.
However, the more I sketch, the less I felt the format worked. I felt the book would work better in landscape format as this gave a larger overall width to the spreads which would carry the information better.
I drew up a flatplan consisting of 36 pages to start with, which gave me a double page spread for each designer.
I added a cover and back cover. I then realised I needed to think about the inside cover and contents/index etc..
I din’t really want to go over the 40-page mark, so I made the decision to give my designers a single page rather than a spread.
This didn’t really work, as the page count wasn’t enough.
I laid out a 36-page document in InDesign to see if it made more sense. I set the document up as 36 facing pages with an outside, top and bottom margins of 15.4mm and an inner margin of 40mm. I lated out the page with 8 columns with an 8.5mm gutter. Also, as a matter of process, I set up a rich black colour in the swatches menu as this gives a better result when printed than the default black. The settings were: C25 M25 Y25 K100.
In response to the part of the typography unit about grids, I decided to use the same grid/column structure for each page and demonstrate how type could be laid out in different ways using just one grid. I started with just one page, and my first designer.
I found an image of Johannes Gutenberg on Wikipedia and began with that.
I placed the image on the page and added some filler-type to try and get the layout right. I also added a title and page number. I needed to decide what typeface or faces to use for this publication.
I wanted to create contrast in the book and wanted to use typefaces that would do this. I wanted to use both serif and sans-serif typefaces to achieve maximum contrast and began with one of the typefaces that was a possibility in my initial stages of research: DIN 1451. This was discounted as one of my subjects as there was no evidence of who created it, but I liked it as a minimal, no nonsense, German sans-serif. I used this as my headline on the page in all caps to identify the designers.
Next came the page numbers. Rather than straight forward numbers, I wanted the pages to have classical numbering and used Roman numerals. These would look better in a serif typeface and for this I chose IKANSEEYOUALL by Swiss Typefaces which has a high-contrast of stroke width.
For the body I chose Helvetica Neue as this was a modern, easily readable typeface. To create even more contrast, and building on the Good/Bad Typography exercise, I wanted to use the same typeface in different sizes and weights.
Once I’d laid it all out on the page using the grid, I realised it was a little monochrome. I decided to add some red. I changed the page numbers to red and added an underline covering the width of one column. I then added the designer’s initial as a red overlay on the image in DIN 1451 to mirror the title.
Once I had the basis for the first page layout, I went on to create variations for the other 17 designers I had chosen. I decided to keep the image in the same position on all of the pages as well as the title and page number, these elements were added to the master-page so that the layout would repeat throughout the book. Any images that weren’t black and white I took into Photoshop and desaturated and changed the contrast to fit with the non-photographic images.
As I had divided my designers into 6 chapters of 3, I needed to set up a contents page and clearly define the chapters.
I started with defining the chapters by inserting whole-page dividers with over-sized numbers indicating the different chapters. These were again done using DIN 1451 reversed in white out of a rich-black background.
I then needed to sort the contents page. I did this as a double-page spread and used the over-sized type to write the word ‘contents’ across the spread and lowered the opacity so that I could then write the contents over the top. I did this by numbering the chapters using IKANSEEYOUALL and then I had to decide on titles for my chapters that I then labelled in Helvetica Neue. I confined these to single columns and hyphenated the all-caps chapter titles that I had named:
- Originators
- Timeless
- Distinctive
- Groundbreaking
- Modernity
- Digital.
I now needed a cover. During my research of designers, I came across Saul Bass’ famous quote of “Design is thinking made visible” and decided to use a variation for my book title. I used ‘Thinking Made Visible’ as my book title and added the subheading of ‘The Art of the Type Designer’. I again used DIN as my typeface of choice, but this time I outlined it and lowered its opacity but gave the word ‘visible’ a gradient to make it look as if it was becoming more visible. The subheading was given the same opacity as the title and Helvetica was used.
I found another quote which I wanted to use on the back cover. I didn’t want to mess with it this time and just used it as is with some hanging punctuation, reversed out of the back cover.
I now had my page layouts, my covers and contents. Now all I had to do was to write the content!!!
I had calculated with by using the placeholder type that I needed 200 – 300 words of type for each designer. This was going to be a daunting task. Using the book I mentioned earlier and the internet I began researching my designers. This was much harder than designing the book itself. After I had collated the type for the first 9 of my designers I was relieved to be halfway through. This prompted me to create a double-page spread with the word ‘half.’ written across it in IKANSEEYOUALL, in the red that I’d used earlier.
This led me to produce another spread with the word ‘full.’ at the end of the book. The book didn’t seem balanced. It needed another similar spread at the front of the book, so I added a spread to the front of the book with the word ‘type’ across the spread.
I felt that the book was lacking context. It needed an explanation as to the meaning behind the book. I decided to add a summary section…more writing! I managed to write a few more words to summarise the development of type design over the last 500+ years.
This, again, was reversed out of a black background. The type needed a little more spacing for these to help with the legibility of the paragraphs, as white type appears larger than its black counterpart so the leading and line height need to be larger.
It also gave me the opportunity to add the information about the typefaces used in the book. This seemed to make the book more cohesive. I went on to mock it up.
Now I had to prepare it for print. I had set up my document with a 3mm bleed, which is pretty standard. I had to make sure all my images were linked correctly and at the correct dpi and all colour were CMYK.
I had decided to use Mixam as my printer of choice due to Covid restrictions and they require pdfs to be uploaded as seperate pages which meant my spreads needed to be separated and an extra bleed added to the inner edge. Another point made by a fellow student, that was confirmed by the printers, was that if I was planning to perfect-bind my book, that any ‘read-across’ elements of my book would need to allow for binding to make them legible. This meant that I need to add an extra 4mm to the inner edge of the affected pages, namely the large, single word spreads and the contents page. The printer suggested that I print out the pages at full size with crop marks with the 4mm added and then fold along the 4mm line and then see it the type meets and is continuous across the spread.
The printers were very helpful and communicated with me with any problems and offered lots of useful advice.
I had opted to print the book on 150gsm silk paper with a 250gsm silk cover with a matt lamination to be perfect bound. I felt that the pages would be thick enough at 150gsm and the matt laminate would give the book a high-class feel. The cost for a print run of just 3 copies was approximately £30.
The printers turned the job around in less than a week and I received 6 copies of the book instead of 3. I was amazed at the quality and finish of the book and the time that they took to produce.
Reflection
I really enjoyed this last assignment. It was good to go through the whole process of designing a book and following through to dealing with printers and having the physical book in hand.
I really like the design and feel that I fulfilled the self-defined brief. It has a classy look and feel and I think it would appeal to the target audience. I think that the book has a defined form and function, but also has an element of fun within it. It would make a good coffee table book.
Over the course of the assignment I have explored typography, grid use, layout design, curating images, material choices, finishes and the print process. I feel that using the body type to demonstrate different layouts on the same grid worked really well and showed the flexible possibilities even in the confines of 8 columns.
I have used a vast amount of online and offline research for both the design process, the content writing and the print process. It was a daunting task, but I actually enjoyed the process. Filling the roles of both designer and copywriter gave me a lot of creative freedom in how the book layout worked. I had the ability to fit the content to the design, rather than having pre-written content that couldn’t be edited to fit.
The print process was an area that I didn’t know too much about. This exercise gave me the chance to find out more in regards to what a printer requires from me as the designer and things to bear in mind when designing layouts, such as crossovers(where images or type cross over facing pages on a spread). Having direct contact with the printer and having this explained clearly was invalid.
References
Images
Johannes Gutenberg – Wikipedia.com
William Caxton – Britannica.com
Claude Garamond – WordPress.com
John Baskerville – WordPress.com
Firmin Didot – Pinterest.com
Giambattista Bodoni – Museobodoniano.com
Robert Besley – Pinterest.com
Herman Berthold – Bahoe.de
Morris Fuller-Benton – morrisbenton.com
Paul Renner – Pinterest.com
Eric Gill – alchetron.com
Stanley Morrison – Twitter.com
Howard Kettler – comarts.com
Max Miedinger – Pinterest.com
Jan Tschichold – WordPress.com
Eric Spiekermann – edenspikermann.com
Carol Twombley – Pinterest.com
Tobias Frere-Jones – frerejones.com
Books
A Visual History of Type by Paul McNeil
Production for Graphic Designers by Alan Pipes
Websites
famousgraphicdesigners.com
typewolf.com
Pinterest.com
craig519809.home.blog 