FMP (BA): Book Spreads - InDesign

Arranging the Spreads

I want to start working on my spreads as soon as possible so that if there were any problems with the printing and binding stage I would know in enough time to make the decision of whether to do it myself or print it off at Blurb. I therefore opened up InDesign, typed in my page dimensions (125 x 154mm) and then started to place my spreads.

I placed all of my designs according to what I had learnt from my prototype (which seems so long ago since I had done it). I kept it beside me to use as reference. I couldn't put in the front and back covers right now as they will be done in different dimensions so I only focused on the "inside" pages.

I first focused on displaying the "copyright" information as well as the names of the original texts. Once I had finished writing them up I played around with layout and in the end reduced the text to 8pt and had it left aligned. I chose a soft grey colour for my type as I think that black is too dominating against the white background.

How I've laid this out is that I shall first design the front pages, then on the next two pages they'll be the 'reverse' sides. In this case, my reverse sides for now are going to be blank. On the other side of the "credits" I'll be displaying the right-hand side of DPS 6.

Now I'm moving onto the next pages which will feature the left-hand side of DPS 1 and the right-hand side of DPS 5. The reverse side of this will be the left-hand side of DPS 6 and then the title, author and FTweekend.

Then it was DPS 2 and 4 and then 5 and 1.

The next pages were "easier" as it will display the full spread of DPS 3, which was one of my strongest designs "The Raven". On the other side I had DPS 4 and 2.

And that was all of the inside pages arranged! I shall just to create the covers (which I did in a different document as the dimensions will be different).

Now that all of the pages and covers are done, I could run some test prints and try out some of the bookbinding techniques I had researched right near the beginning of this project.


Reflective Thinking - Summary

This process was made easy due to the fact I had created a small prototype at a much earlier stage. I was able to use that as reference for this process, and as it worked on the prototype I believe that it would work with these.

However I am really worried that something would go wrong in the printing stage, as I had experience with double-sided prints and it didn't work very well before. If this is the case I shall consider having it printed out in Staples or with Blurb.