FMP (BA): Quick Experimentation - Gold Pen & Bookbinding Cloth

I'm still in the process of creating my final product so I decided to take the time to try some little experiments in the meantime. 

Gold Pen

I recently purchased a gold pen as recommended from my friend as it had a very fluid flow, and resembled gold foil. I took one of my test prints of my front cover to practice on so that I could get a general idea of how it would look on my book.

Thoughts

I used the gold pen to cover the darker areas as I knew that it would be a shade darker than the one printed, so it would look weird to use it for the lighter areas if it was darker than the shaded parts. I felt that this worked quite well but it might be a bit too dark... This might be because the printer had run out of ink so the lighter areas could be a bit more visible than what's shown here, so it could work.

FMP (BA): French Fold Prototype 3

My next idea was to have some sort of book fold (cloth?) to cover the spine and gold thread, and even though I am quite satisfied with the thread showing, I want to explore into as many options as possible so that I have more to choose from to take across to my final design. Besides, there is always a possibility that the method I didn't try could've been better than the others, so it was in my best interest to try it out.

This means that I have to go back to my InDesign files and adjust the white gap and make it smaller as I only want the fold to cover 1cm of the front and back design, so the gap would have to be smaller than that (but only slightly).

With that done I could now print it out and then start making my prototype. I used the exact same method as before but this time I stuck my covers separately on a piece of black card. As I haven't got the exact materials to produce this book-cloth-fold I'm just using a scrap piece of paper for now.

Prototype Production

I printed all of my designs off onto cartridge paper which is the paper that I'm hoping to use for my book. This will help give me an idea of how thick the spine would be as well as pointing out any adjustments I need to make to the design.

I first cut them all out with a scalpel before folding and arranging them into place. Then it was just a case of repeating what I had learnt from before.
My book/cloth fold hadn't yet arrived so I made do with a spare piece of black card to give me a general idea of what it would look like. The spine was actually only 0.5cm wide so I didn't have to use much of it.

FMP (BA): French Fold Prototypes 2

Design Process - Creating the Prototype

I first wanted to concentrate on my front cover because I would have to adjust it slightly by making it a centimetre wider. This was easily done as all I had to do was use the 'transform' too an made it larger to fit into the wider gap.

Then it was time to get my other pages done. Unlike my saddle stitch design I hadn't created a digital document for this so I created a new one in InDesign, making sure that I added an extra centimetre to the width of it to allow space for the "fold".

I then put this document to the side and created a new one with the old dimensions. The reason for this was because once everything is arranged in it's place I could simply copy and paste it to the new document... This will help me a lot, especially if I chose the "paste in place" option, as it should leave 1cm space on the edge more accurately than it would be if I were placing them onto it firsthand.

This arrangement was very different to what I had done for the double-sided design. Each design was technically "together" here, and it's very confusing to explain but they were basically next to each other. More so than the previous design anyway.

FMP (BA): Saddle Stitch Prototype 2

I went back to Staples to get some more of my work printed out as they had the highest level of accuracy when it came to printing out double-sided even though there was still a minor white gap due to the off-centre mark. I was hoping that these "prototypes" could serve as final pieces if they went correctly, so I made sure that all of the adjustments I had made previously were included in my designs.

I printed off two versions; one for the saddle stitch, and another for my French fold design. I decided to first focus on my saddle stitch one.

I used the exact same method I did when I was doing my first prototypes [here]. However I used a few new materials such as wax so that I could wax my thread to make it smoother, and I also bought some new needles that were a bit sharper.

Process

Final

FMP (BA): Prototype - Accordion Book

The reason why I would want to do this "accordian" book is because it was my original plan when I had only produced 4 pages at the very beginning. I didn't think that I had the time to not only produce more designs but to turn them into double-paged spreads, so I had pushed this thought aside.

However due to my problems with double-sided printing the accordion book does sound promising as it wouldn't require for any of my designs to be printed in such a way, and could actually be printed as joined spreads and not having each side separated. It's a bit too early to make my decision just yet so I thought that the best way to decide is to actually create an accordion prototype.

The tutorial:

My "screenshots":

FMP (BA): Prototype - Saddle Stitching

Saddle Stitching

I laid out all of my test prints from Staples and cut them out with a scalpel one-by-one. As it had that problem with it being slightly off-centre I had to cut it down a bit smaller in order to trim off any white edges.

Once all of the pages were trimmed I folded each one in the middle separately. I then arranged them in the same fashion as I did previously, now that I know that my prototype I had produced much earlier had worked.

I then followed the saddle stitch binding tutorial from Sea Lemon:

My "screenshots":

FMP (BA): Prototypes - Double-Sided Print

My main focus is to now create some prototypes so that I am prepared for when it comes to assembling the final thing.

Test Prints - University Printers

The first stage involved printing out my spreads double-sided. I'm hoping that everything would go smoothly once this has been done and it would also give me a general idea of what my book would look like.

Once everything was printed I put them together in the same order I had referenced from my prototype. I didn't cut them out as I wanted to see if everything was displayed correctly and that each side was with their other halves (so that they formed a complete DPS).

The prototype worked! Everything was in the correct order, however, I noticed that when I had folded them that the designs looked slightly... Odd. It seems that when I printed them double-sided the printer had shifted the design on the other side to the left by at least 1cm!

FMP (BA): Book Cover - Adjustments

I decided to go back and have a look at my book covers now that I have some spare time on my hands. Even though these adjustments aren't necessary I thought that I might just play around with different effects as I really want to bring out the swirl of feathers/quills.

Out of curiosity, I tried to create a shadow with the swirls but because I didn't draw the swirls separate from the banner it did cause some problems with gaps.

My first try was with the "drop shadow" in "blending options":

I then tried it by simply duplicating it again and lowering the opacity.

The reason I lowered the opacity instead of changing it to black/grey was because the drop shadow effect that I had done previously made the design look slightly "dirty" against the soft grey/cream background. I wanted to build up on this gold and "heavenly" effect so that it softens the overall appearance.

However, that didn't work quite as well as I thought because it made the design look far too busy and confusing:

With those experiments done - and with them not going as planned - I began to think of other ways to improve the swirls. I then came up with the idea to darken some of the places where the feathers "fold", and then do some lighter shading on where the light source would hit. 

To do this I simply duplicated and then locked my swirls layer, took a soft brush tool, and began to paint the darker areas.

This worked really well because the darker and lighter areas have created depth and made the swirls more 3D rather than just lines.


Reflective Thinking - Summary

I am glad that I had taken the time to experiment a little bit more with my front cover because it is one of the most important factors of a book; it has to attract the viewer so that they would pick it up and flick through, so I need to make it stand out from the rest of the leaflets handed out at the Oxford Literary Festival.

The swirls now have more depth and it adds more colour to the design overall, even if it's simply different shades of one of the main colours. This gives me the idea to maybe use gold thread... Well, that'll all depend on whether or not my prototypes turn out as planned.

They also bring out the banner and books because those are so light in comparison, and lifts it up from the background. This design now has three "layers"; foreground, middle-ground (the swirls) and the background.

My next step is to move onto trying out some prototypes. Even though I haven't technically finished my designs nor have I tweaked my existing ones, I really want to get the printing side of things sorted as the tweaking wouldn't take too long to do.

Learning Outcomes:
[9] Developed their ability to work with complex material, analyse problems and identify appropriate solutions.

FMP (BA): Front Book Cover - Digital Design Process

Making Adjustments

I scanned everything in and made adjustments. This process didn't take long at all as I have gotten so used to doing it, and once everything was done I put them all together on the same document and began to put everything in place. I had taken note that the quill was too close to the book so I shifted it upwards using both the lasso tool and transform tool.

Fixing the Type

With that done I decided to edit "Quotes" in Illustrator because the inconsistency with the white gaps was really affecting the whole design and made it look slightly messy. Using the Pen tool I started to draw the white gaps again - having redone the inking and filling in the gaps before scanning it into Illustrator.

I didn't want to spend too long doing this so most of the white gaps were inaccurate, as I just wanted the general idea. I wasn't too sure about this though so I added in some white diamonds to see if that would improve it. 

FMP (BA): It Always Seems Impossible - DPS

For my Nelson Mandela design I decided to flick back to my old sketch where I had drawn up several layouts. The one I wanted to go for was where I only had the banner with his prison number on it, and his name beneath it. The background would be white as I want to keep this design as minimalist as possible - a heavy contrast to my other designs. This would then provide the viewer a small chance to breathe before turning over to another 'filled' design.

Before I moved onto designing the other page, however, I needed to make some small changes to my existing design. When I had done this design - it seems so long ago - I had asked for feedback and one of them was to delete his name from the banner and create an 'end' to it. Otherwise the banner would look like chains which isn't the connotation I want to produce. 

To do this I used the eraser tool to erase his name, and copied and pasted the 'end' of the banner that was at the top. I had roughly drawn a guideline for it, so I just shifted it so that it rests atop of it. Using the transform tool I flipped it horizontally so that it fits on the end. Then I used the brush and the eraser tool to smoothen it slightly. 

FMP (BA): Not all Those Who Wander Are Lost - DPS

With my the Raven DPS safely out of the way and awaiting feedback I can now work on my other DPS designs, and the first one that I want to do is the J.R.R. Tolkien quote. I am a big fan of his work and have always loved the little sketches of the maps in the books, so I used them as a big source of inspiration for this design.

I had the idea of just carrying the design on as if it was a map, possibly just using the same tea-stained background as I did before. They actually have a really good format so I might just use theirs as a reference. I really like how the compass' and the name of the map are laid out and drawn, so I thought the best place to start was with the book title and author's name. It would be nice to practice uncial handwriting again!

As it had been a while since I had done uncial lettering I allowed myself a couple of hours just to practice with the letters I was going to use. I first started with the ones I had already done before, and after a while I was beginning to get used to it again so I tried out different letters.

It didn't take me long until I was able to actually write out "the fellowship of the ring" with ease, so at least I had that section ready. I had to practice several times on how to write the uppercase K but once I got the hang of that I was able to write out "J.R.R Tolkien".

I was now able to do both lines and so on another page I used black in and wrote them out.

FMP (BA): The Raven DPS

I have decided to do this project separate from my other DPS designs that I had done so far as my process was a bit chaotic; I couldn't make my mind up about this design and kept going backwards and forwards, that even I am confused with what I did sometimes.

The Raven

For my Edgar Allan Poe piece I only really had one decorative font on there, so there was a possibly of either going with the same font or produce another one. I therefore produced four versions: the one that's already been done; two script styles in different thicknesses; and one sans serif with the same width and height as the sans serif I had drawn for my book cover.

I practised with my dip pen on the bottom of the page but it didn't really carry that thick-thin stroke effect I was looking for, so instead I just went with what I already had done with micron.

I scanned all of my versions in to have a closer look at what I had, and from this I picked out the advantages and disadvantages of each one.

FMP (BA): DPS Spread Designs

I've been a bit stuck with my book cover design so I thought that instead of lingering on it, I would move on to producing designs for my DPS so that I could carry on churning some creativity. I am worried that if I don't do any designing or sketching that I would lose inspiration... So here's a way to solve that.

The first one I worked with was for "The Fault in Our Stars" by John Green, with the quote "My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations". I had a couple of solid idea of what I wanted it to look like which I quickly jotted down alongside my ideas for all of the other spreads:

-

The Fault in Our Stars 

Sketch

My first idea was to write the author's name and book title in the exact same format as I had done on the other page, so I lay a piece of paper over my design and lightly traced it's baseline. I then drew my cap-height and median lines in before writing out the title and name. For this I wanted to keep to the same typestyle as I had previously used.

My second idea was to use the same typestyle but on a straight line, and my third to just do it in sans serif on a straight line.

FMP (BA): Moby Dick - Design Process

The Final Outcome

The Process

With the sketch all inked and scanned in I brought it up onto Photoshop and then went to Image > Adjustments > Invert to make the background black and everything else white. On a new layer I began to fill in the whale in white by drawing around it with the lasso tool and using the paint bucket. This was a lot easier than trying to paint it using the brush tool and erasing the areas that went outside of the lines.

FMP (BA): Grunge Textures & Experimentation

I want to have a look around to see if there were any grunge textures or tutorials available on the internet to work in Photoshop and maybe Illustrator. I'm not too sure whether or not I'll be drawing it out as a vector or just simply painting it in Photoshop so I need to keep my options open.
This idea was influenced by my recent post where I talked about what aspects that the most inspirational designs had, and most of them had grunge/scratched backgrounds to give the design some texture. 

Here's a list of some of the websites that offer free grunge textures:

grungetextures.com

texture king

lost and taken

Photoshop Experimentation

I first started experimenting on Photoshop as I'm quite familiar with using textures there, so I created a new A4 document (the dimensions doesn't really matter right now) and set the background colour in black. 

I then placed a grunge texture that I got from lost and taken on the layer above it. When I changed the layer style to Overplay, Multiply and other styles the texture just totally disappeared... So out of curiousity I used a white paintbrush using a default brush tool and just dotted randomly on the page. I placed the textured layer on Overlay again and it still didn't work. However when I put it on Multiply there was a slight texture to it. 

FMP (BA): Moby Dick Sketches & Experimentation

Initial Sketches

I was so inspired by the typeface styles I showed in my last post that I had done some sketches based off this. I first tried to imitate it but then I wanted to add my own kind of style to it so that I had my "voice". I wasn't too sure how decorative I wanted to go so for now I just drew whatever I wanted as it could always be adapted later. I started small because I just wanted to get the general idea of the typeface I was going to do and didn't want to concentrate on layout just yet.

Developing Sketches - Lettering 

I then picked a few to adapt over the next couple of pages, even if I was only changing a few things. I noticed that during my last 'project' where I was hand-lettering the Lord of the Rings quote that my lettering was better if I focused on just one word to figure out how wide each letter should be. After each type was drawn I used tracing paper to copy it and then add a new feature to it.
I wanted to emphasise the "sailor" theme that I was going for so I added a few swirls and flourishes to the type design inspired by Victorian typography, but I felt that it was much too obvious (as I tried to imitate waves) and much preferred the ones where there was a diamond-shape in the middle. I didn't want to overpower the type and although I do want to try out flourishes I didn't want to add them just yet.

FMP (BA): Oscar Wilde's Quote - Digital

When I looked back at the line work this morning I decided to make a few adjustments so that the most important words "I am so clever" and "I don't understand" had a 3D effect. I did originally want to create an effect where the words appear to be falling out of firework sparks but felt that it didn't work out so well due to the large number of overlapping lines. Instead, I went for the 'normal' 3D effect but for the top line I drew it so that the shading pointed inwards to create a perspective.

I scanned in the developed line work into Photoshop to start the colouring stage. I deleted all of the white areas and put in the black layer, and when I coloured all of the line work in white just so I could see it against the black I came across a pretty neat look; it was, as people could say, a happy accident. I then played around with different colours and gradients before settling with the orange to red gradient. At the same time I dropped in a midnight-blue-black gradient for the background to make it look closer to the night sky. 

FMP (BA): Today's Experimentation - Tea/Coffee Paper and Celtic Lettering

Tea & Coffee Stained Paper

Just before I started on my Celtic lettering exercise I had the idea of trying out tea and coffee stained paper to provide that medieval texture to the design. I got this idea from looking at the map of Middle Earth and from watching Lord of the Rings because whenever they did use paper or read books in the films the paper was slightly yellow. If I could achieve a similar look it would make it more authentic and relevant to the Lord of the Rings theme.

I started by doing tea-stained paper because at the time I thought that coffee might be too dark for my design. What I did was put a couple of tea bags in a jun and left it to brew for around ten minutes to get as much of the colouring as possible. Once that was done I poured the liquid into a dish that was just big enough for the paper and put one sheet in it for around 3 minutes. I had to press it down a couple of times because the paper kept floating to the surface but after those 3 minutes I took it out, used a hair dryer to dry it a little bit and scrunched it before putting it on a plastic wallet to dry all of the way through.
I repeated the process with three other sheets of paper, and each paper was left in the liquid for longer. My second sheet was in it for 4 minutes, the third for 7 minutes, and the fourth for 10 minutes. I decided not to scrunch these ones because I could always ruffle it later and besides, when they dry they would automatically be a little crumpled. After the 10 minute sheet I did the 3 and 4 minute one again without crumpling them.

FMP (BA): Dr Seuss - "Sketchy" Version

Reflective Thinking

I have briefly mentioned in a previous post that an illustrator named Carlos Garde-Martin came to visit the university and I managed to have a little chat with him about this project. While I was flicking through showing him some of my sketches and designs he pointed out that he really liked my hand-rendered work, and preferred my sketch version of my Dr. Seuss design than my digital one. This brought me back to when I was talking to one of my lecturers as he also mentioned that he preferred my sketch. I know I said that I would leave this quote until I've designed some more but while I was stuck on inspiration I decided to sketch out my design again. 

The Process

Sketch & Line Work 

To do this I simply traced my printed version onto another piece of paper and started to sketch it out like my old version, using two different thicknesses of micron pens when it came to line the work. 

FMP (BA): You Are You Contin (again)

The Final (hopefully) Piece

The Process

It seems like I'm continuously going back to this! As much as I love lettering... This is getting a bit annoying...

I joke, I joke. I mean it's all part of the learning process, right? To always go back and find things to change that you didn't notice before? 

Well hopefully this will be the last time that I drastically change this piece because I am getting a bit worried that I'm running out of time.

My idea is to basically take out the hat completely and just focus on rearranging the type according to the structure I quickly sketched out when I got home from the long train journey. Hopefully this wouldn't take too long to do (but digital stuff always does, sigh). So here goes!