Design Principles - Study Task 7

As with most elements of book making, different kinds of folds can have different effects on the overall design and serve different purposes. Folds can make books interactive, can serve as a way to withhold information temporarily, emphasise a certain piece of text or lead the reader into reading a book in a certain order. For my design I chose the check book fold.

This kind of fold will be good for leaflets that contain information ad it leads the eye in a certain direction and it can be folded small.

Design Principles - Study Task 6

What is a book?

To me, a book is a number of pages that have been bound together and is usually of a substantial length, however this term can mean different thing to different people and is up for interpretation. A book can be a lot of things, it can tell a story. display work, contain memories, or provide information. How effectively a book does each of these things can depend on the type of bind, the stock and the size. For example, you wouldn't print a novel on translucent paper, or try to make a scrap book with 60 GSM paper. That would be completely impractical. 

These three images display different methods of binding a book. each bind creates a different effect and changes how the book will look and ultimately read, it can also determine how durable and how long a book will last as the permanency of  the bind varies.

 Stock also effects the overall look of a book, it can also determine how a book reads too. If the stock is thick the pages will need to be held open and will not lay flat, different stock also allows for different effects, such as embossing.

Using certain colours can give an overarching theme to a book, maybe using a mono tone colour scheme or limiting yourself to one like in this example.

using a combination of thick stock and thin stock can be really effective if done right, for example using a thicker stock to print images on and thinner pages for body text etc.

All of these factors go into making a publication and even subtle design decisions can make a huge difference.

Design Principles - Study Task 5

After discussing canons i have come to a conclusion as to where i stand on them. I feel like they have become a sacred thing because a lot of very famous, iconic, and beautiful work, conform to the canons of page construction. However i dont think its impossible to create something iconic/beautiful, without conforming to the canons of page construction. Because of this i dont think cannons are constraining/ limit creativity as their are many out there and you can make them work for you by choosing the most appropriate ones.

 As you can see by these canons, they can be quite accommodating, so unless the work you create is very abstract and obscure i doubt you wouldnt be able to find a canon that aids you design,

Design Principles - Study Task 4

For this task I decided to look at publication spreads that specifically featured people in the foreground. 

In this spread, the picture bleeds on to two pages rather than keeping confined to one. This means that as its a bigger part of the spread, the readers eye is drawn to it, a sure fire way of making something the focal point of  spread.

 In this example, it looks like the figure has been painted with a red stripe which incorporates him seamlessly with the background design. This keeps him in focus as that intense splash of colour draws the readers eye to him and what i assume is a direct quote underneath.

In this image, like the first, the portrait i think kind of bleeds slightly on to the second page, definitely making her the focal point of the image but the use of black and white imagery means that her face is the lightest part of the image, drawing the readers eye and separating her from the background.

However, looking through a lot of publications, this is just one of the few ways to separate background from the foreground/ clearly establish a background and foreground but i think the use of colour and and bleed are one of the most effective ways of doing this.

Design Principles - Study Task 3

In this session we looked at grids and how they are used within publication and we were given the task to outline the grid of a newspaper spread to get a better understanding of grids in context. Usually when doing any kind of work, layout was something i did by eye and i had never considered working to a specific grid. This task has made me realise how helpful and effective they can be in creating really nice, spaced out and balanced work.

This is an example of the kind of things we looked at, using more and more lines increases the flexibility within a design and personally i dont think it hinders design like a lot of people think as long as they are designed appropriately they can really speed up publication design as well.

Design Principles - Study Task 2

We discussed our least favourite colours and the reason behind is, its not something i've  really thought  about before, but in the end I picked bright yellow. The reason for this is i think its quite a garish colour and it can be quite jarring.

We were then tasked to to choose one other colour that, alongside black and a hue or tone of our 'least favourite', could work effectively within a scheme for a simple children's book. 

I decided to mock it up as a book cover:

id made a colour wheel for my own reference and using tertiary colours, yellow goes well with purple so i decided to choose this as my second colour. I incorporated black, but only as the typeface.

What ive learned from doing this is, although i dont like very bright yellow, pairing it with more toned down and darker variations it can work quite well

Design Principles - Study Task 1

Colour Theory

After an introduction into colour theory we explored how to put that into context and the use of colour within certain situations. In this task we were asked to select four genres of books and explore their relationship to colour by finding the common colours associated with that genre and changing it to something less common, here is what i produced:

 Horror: Usually horror novels use dark colours to compliment the dark nature of the story. To figure out the overiding colours of this cover I colour grabbed the darkest part of the cover (the darkness around the door) and the most vibrant part of the greenish light. Then using the pantone colour book I got the code for the closest matching colour.

The codes were:
Black/dark grey: Pantone P Process Black U
Dark green: Pantone P 177-16 U

 Crime: Again with crime novels, colours are usually dark and quite often feature the colour red to symbolise blood. Using the same process i gathered the pantone codes.

The codes were:

Grey:  Pantone P 169-16 U
Dark red: Pantone P 56-16 U

 Fairy Tales: As most fairy tales derive from very old stories, a lot of the book covers were very old and traditional looking. i found that most used this sort of maroon/bugandy colour as a base.

The code was:

Burgandy: Pantone P 64-15 U













Western: With this genre, a lot of yellow/bright orange was used, probably to reflect the colour of sand which is very prominent in western films.

The code was:

Yellow: Pantone P 10-7 U












After this initial research we then re imagined the potential colour for these genres. I set it out like the penguin book covers as it was something we had looked at and it allowed the colour to be very dominant on the cover.



Horror: For this one we chose yellow. The reason for this is its a very vibrant and jarring colour which can be shocking to the eye. We thought this went well and complimented the themes that are usually presented within horror books. Also, yellow is used a lot in nature to represent a warning for example on wasps.



Code:

Pantone P Process Yellow U

 Crime: For this we chose blue, it doesn't represent danger or anything related to blood but for us the combination of blue and white reminds us of flashing blue lights on police cars and ambulances and the blue and white colour scheme of the police, something that fits the theme of crime.

Code:

Pantone P 112-6 U

 Fairy tales: It was hard to pick an alternative colour for this one as modern fairy tales for children normally include a huge range of colours. Despite this we went with quite a soft pink. To us this really represented children and childlike things, which is closely associated with fairy tales.

Code:

Pantone P 75-5 U

Western: For the western we went with this light green, Western novels and films often feature a lot of outdoor scenery and are based in rural settings and because of this we thought green was a good way to represent the rural nature of western novels.

Code:

Pantone P 157-8 U