Year 3 - Project 2: The Future Of Illustration - Illustration: The Next Ten Years | Twenty Twenty Two Photos

Some photos of my little book.

8 page book held in a card sleeve, stitched spine.

Year 3 - Project 2: The Future Of Illustration - Illustration: The Next Ten years | Twenty Twenty Two

Report for the future of illustration project.

I felt like doing something type based. I kept it really plain and simple. Hopefully in an elegant way.

Front cover. Font is OPS DIN.

Pages 1&2. Outlining the early steps of the project.

It looks a little odd when it's spread out like this on a flat design because you don't get the fold and the two sides sort of merge together. It looks better in the real book. I'll get some photos up.

Pages 3&4 in which we find the script for the voice-over.

Pages 5&6. Outlining the later stages of the project.

Throughout the book I used different point sizes to emphasise some words and different tracking and spacing to make the layout and type seem a little erratic and free-formed in the same way that the illustration was. I think the coloured bars hold it together well.

The back cover is plain so I'm not posting it.

Here instead is the jacket for the booklet.

Professional Project: Layout selection

After looking through a bunch of illustration/art/design books, analysing and logging the various layouts I came up with a fair few spreads or pages that I felt were quite effective. Obviously they will need to be edited and adapted to fit on one grid otherwise the flow of the book will be quite strange. But here are the ones that I've pulled out of books that I think work well.

This is the selection I will be using to set my work & my text on. I'm not sure how to choose at the moment. It was suggested that I devise a random process similar to the process I'm using for subject matter to choose to give the book a completely random element. That could work well if I structure the beginning to introduce it properly before giving over my design to chance.

Professional Project Update

Earlier today we had the pitch/initial critique for our Final Major Projects. Mine did not go well to say the least. Below is what I presented. 

 

It's essentially an idea for an art/illustration book containing my artwork similar to that of many that can be found in bookshops/art shops/libraries. I got shot down because it was generally felt that the idea lacked a little substance/context. It needed a reason or a theme that could run throughout the book and make it more interesting rather than just a compilation of my work. There were many suggestions for this but one quickly rose to the top which was to base it around my 365 drawings from last year. After some thinking I decided that I don't want to just document these in a book though as that means my entire project is InDesign based. So what I'm going to do is use the process idea from my 2010 work, in which I would find something to illustrate and respond to it within a certain time period. I want to look more into the methods of finding the subject matter and the process that goes into it. I will be trying out various methods from scrolling through links on wikipedia to simply asking people on facebook to looking at trends on twitter.

It's all about the process.

Gallery Nav Page For Website

I couldn't decide what large image to add to my home page, so I decided to leave that one to stew for a while and move onto the next bit. Most of the pages are all going to be pretty straight forward so I wanted to do the most awkward one first, the gallery set, and get it out of the way. This page was also the only one that I knew exactly what I was putting on it, for all the others I have to make imagery decisions. Made myself up some nice live traced buttons, same style as the normal navigation.

Drew myself up some icons for the different categories within my gallery.

Set it into the dreamweaver, fiddle with the layout and sizes a bit. Then preview it in IE. At the moment i'm going to leave it as is and see what gets said at the crit on Thursday. But i'm thinking maybe grab the whole set and shrink them down into the middle a bit more, theyr'e a bit dominating at the moment.

Also you may have noticed that my twitter button doesn't seem to work properly in IE. Issue needs to be sorted.

Graphic Systems: Neither her nor there Compeleted

The book cover for the sixth and final book in the series, Neither here nor there. I like the pink on the blue, it's working really well I feel, and overall looking back through the colour schemes of all 6 they fit together well as a series. The smaller illustration here is of a piece of swiss cheese, as mentioned in the book & the main illustration is of a pigs head with an apple in it's mouth, also mentioned in the book. This illustration is a little darker than the others in terms of content but they vary from book to book so I don't think this is too much of a drastic problem. I like the layout on the front a lot, again it is differnet from the others but the themes stay consistent throughout. As a whole series i'm really pleased with the work, the colour schemes, layouts, illustration & type are all working well together as a system.

Graphic Systems: Down under completed

The fifth book cover is complete. This one is for Down under, a book about Australia which is why I've gone with this colour scheme. I have already used yellow, which would of been first choice, so I had to go with this light brown which is as close as I could get and think it works well to reflect the country. It also works well with the green on top and the bright orange really stands out. The small illustration is of a boomarang for obvious reasons. The large illustration is of a Nothomyrmecia Macrops which I find really interesting. It is a species of ant that was thought to have died out 100 million years ago but has been found living in colonies in the Australian outback. It is a species left from when wasps were evolving into ants (which in itself I find fascinating, although the shape of them is a give away if you think about it). On the back cover I've gone with the same kind of format that I used on the first book, with an illustration down one side and then the quotes on the other. In this case I think that this has worked particularly well and has created an effective layout. Overall I'm really pleased with this one, I think that the layout, illustration & colour scheme & I think they are all working really well together to give a representation of Australia and the trip.

Graphic Systems: The lost continent Completed

Continuing my speedy work on this project I give you; The lost continent. Here, obviously, we have again a similar layout to the ones designed previously. Today's illustration is of a portable gas stove (as mentioned in the book), I did a little bit of research into it and this is the sort of style that was around in the time that Bryson is taking about. I like the knobs on it, I think they work really well with the white set against the coloured backing. Continued is the type as well. The additional illustration above the authors name is of a corn cob, a reference to small town America & also mentioned in the opening of the book. The colour scheme is staying basic, one main colour, white, and smaller pieces of additional colour. The box on the back on two of the covers has a black circle around on the inside, the other two don't. This is because two of the covers have a lot more written on the back, I'm going to split it three to three to keep it even. The layout on the fronts also been changed around again but this is acceptable as the system allows the movement as long as it's fairly similar.

Graphic Systems: A walk in the woods Completed

Another book cover busted out in a day, even though I had a crit all day at uni. Speed. It's getting easier now that I've figured out my system for setting up the files & getting things in the right place. I really like the colour scheme on this one, I think the green and the brown are working really well together and the yellow of the bears face really stands out as it's the only other colour. This ones got a leaf as the extra little illustration above 'Bryson' which is obviously derived from 'the woods.' In addition to this I've also added a couple of little twigs onto the back cover box as it was brown which made me think "tree." Overall I think this is another successful cover. It's slightly different to the others; as it had such a vertical illustration I had to move the bear to one side and have the text on the other but I don't think that this has effected the layout negatively at all. It just adds a little more variety to the set. The crit went well today, my designs recieved a good reception and the only problem that came up were the use of the grid to get sections like the 'Black Swan' logo & the barcode in the same place every time. So I edited my grid system and simply dropped the barcode and repeating text at the bottom of the back cover onto the master page. Problems solved.

Delayed Summer Project

So were back to the summer project that went AWOL. Today has been spent fussing with re-creations, paragraph styles, tech problems & generally getting back to grips with InDesign. After four trips back and forth from the printers we finally managed to get the files all correct and it's been set up to print. Photos to follow of the actual book, but for now heres some JPGs.

Front and back covers.

We wanted to keep this simple and effective and not overcrowd it. I think this has worked quite well by using the corners rather than setting up a standard title situation. I think it makes it quite interesting and unusual. The page size is 200mm by 200mm as it is a standard size which we could all work to & get printed cheaply. The grid we used was a 3 column grid, 12.7mm margins & 5mm gutters.

Inside front cover & page 1.

Again very simple leading into the book which I think is effective for the same reasons. I like the unusual layout. We used 'Eurostyles' 10pt for the body copy & 'Rockwell extra bold' for the title. The brief was to take elements of all four of our original layouts & combine them to create a consistent book. Body copy was chosen from Vicky Kwan's & the title font is from my work. We felt these worked well both individually and as a combination as both are easily legible but are different enough that they don't merge.

Page 2 & 3.

Re-creation of my original layout. The font has been changed to 'Eurostyles' to fit with the rest of the book, this meant I needed to make a few tweaks in order to realign the copy & stop any widows etc.

My layout was also the only one of the 4 to have running heads at the top so these have now been moved to the bottom.

Page 4 & 5.

Due to the slight change in page size & grid the image had to be changed in size in order to keep the composition correct. We chose to keep coloured questions throughout as all white looked a little plain. The questions are also in bold as 3 of 4 previous designs already has this element.

Page 6 & 7.

First set of Vicky's spreads. This was more of an issue as 3 of us had black backgrounds while Vicky's had full illustrations. We tried a few different things but in the end we elected to keep the imagery the same & make it contrast with the rest of the work. She also had a 1,2,1 set up of a 4 page spread rather than a two double page set up which meant a rearranging of her imagery in order to make it fit.

Page 8 & 9.

As we all used different colours in our imagery we felt it bet to each use different colours in our text as well that would complement the imagery so Vicky stuck with red.

Page 10 & 11.

Quite similar to mine in the colour scheme, the only difference is there is no space between the questions & the answers due to space issues it had to be compressed in order to fit the whole interview into the space provided & keep the composition interesting.

Page 12 & 13.

On some pages we have removed the running heads as it would of ruined the composition of the page.

Page 14 & 15.

Another black background layout, the main difference here is the use of colour which is blue instead of yellow so as to be consistent with the imagery.

Page 16 & 17.

Page 18 & 19.

Back to simplicity to fit in with the front cover & contents page. After our trips to the printers we had to add two more pages so as to create the required 4 pages for a signature. These are not shown here because they are blank.

Re: Layout Design

So I made a few adjustments to these layouts here. Firstly I brought the DIY boxes across to run in line with the text and the stained glass piece came in so that the margin could be the same on both spreads. Good spacing. Other adjustments have been very dull and consumed nearly all of my day. I would say a good 4 hours at least, making miniscule tweaks such as there being a hyphenation in an awkward place, and fixing this would then create a widow which would need sorting out which would create another hyphenation which would in turn make a question run over a column break. I think you get the point. In any case this took a long time to rectify to a situation where I am happy with it. Evaluation to be done.

New Layouts

First double spread. 

So the edits I've made since the crit is that I had too many illustrations on my work, so I reduced the number. This stained glass window piece received some good feedback from tutors and fellow scholars alike so I've used this as a larger element of the work. I also filled in the image sections on the left here with the D.I.Y. letters. I chose to do this because firstly Ellen Lupton's work is based a lot arround the D.I.Y. ethos and a lot of her book titles include it, secondly she talks about how everyone is a designer and how design tools are becoming more readily accessible to everybody and not just the professionals so this holds in with the D.I.Y. ethos really well. I've also made some more technical adjustments such as aligning my text to the baseline grid, sorting out single lines of paragraphs, hyphenation and so forth.

Second double spread. 

On this spread I've again reduced the number of illustrations. This piece also received some good feedback so I've chosen to keep this one in and remove the others. It took me ages to sort out the copy in a way that I like on the page as all the adjustments I made to it made it spread out loads but I think this works really well and I've managed to get all the questions and answers in good places so that it isn't at all disjointed. I think the black space definitely works a lot better than filling every available space with imagery just for the sake of it.

Layout Design 2 Double Spreads

Okay, so we've already seen this one, but I've added in the correct text to it, and put in my paragraph styles to seperate the interviewer from interviewee. Some small problems occured though, as since I moved computers I don't have the same fonts, so it's changed the font from Adobe Garamond pro on my body copt to times new roman. And also I don't have Futura condensed extra bold on here so it's put the title on normal futura and so it wouldn't fit in the allocated space. It's supposed to read "Intelligent Design" since Ellen Lupton talks about design as a religion in the interview. Most obvious copy writing ever. I also added another 5mm to the gutter as my text would have been chopped off, which meant I had to make the page wider so I'm now running a 200x210 setup.

Here's the second spread. I needed to keep it fairly similar so that it stays with the theme. So we have a continuation of the different sized text boxes creating space with pictures sat in places to create more odd shapes. Overall I think this works quite well. I tried not to let the extra text (that I had to add in to fit in the whole interview) overpower the page and I think that by leaving a lot of space around it I managed to do this. I also added some page numbers and section tabs in here but they don't seem to have shown up in the export which is pretty annoying. Oh well. All that remains is to create illustrations/photography and get rid of these big orange boxes. TBPS. (to be posted soon)

Layout Mock Up

Here is a layout mock up for my typeradio project. Orange boxes=images. I like the use of blank space and uneven text boxes.

Ellen Lupton

For the new project at uni I have to design a layout for an interview with her in a magazine format. So instead of getting down to some actual work I thought i'd draw a dodgy portrait. win.

Promo Print

Page 1 of my Booklet.

Page 2&3

Page 4&5

Page 6&7

Page 8

Layouts

So the next project, number 5, is "promo print" in which we have to create a small book about our work on text and image so far and to say something about us as a designer.
This is a piece of group work looking at layouts where we made a variety of different layouts using coloured paper to represent images and dummy text of different measures.
This is mine. Pretty standard layout.



This is another piece of layout design where we had to use items that we had on us to create a layout.
I found this quite interesting as the different shapes and textures available were different for everyone.