This was the last week of the graphic design project, and I got to finish it!
I printed off the book jacket at the correct scale. (Side note: with every single Mac refusing to print my InDesign document in any format, it took me over an hour to get this single thing done. Macs exhaust me and I don’t care for them.)
I measured and wrapped it round the book, to provide photographic evidence of it in an applied situation for my final worksheet.
What do I think went well with this project?
I am happy with the overall look of the book. The image for the front cover, touched up in PhotoShop, was very successful. I’m glad I went for the cooler colour scheme in the end because I feel it communicates the concept of “non-places” better: cold, connoting isolation, loneliness and a lack of emotion. I suppose the fact that the trees are bare against a cold sky is appropriate as it shows a place where life can’t be sustained, just as Auge states that life can’t be sustained in non-places.
What do I think didn’t go well?
I feel like despite all of the time that went into it, this final cover looks a little primitive. This might be because of the white edges: although I made that decision carefully in relation to Penguin’s brand identity, the block photographs on white coming out of a normal printer made it look a little thrown-together. To solve this problem, the cover being printed on glossy paper may have given it the professional look it needs.
In addition, I feel like the positioning of the blurb in relation to the image looks a little unfinished. It’s legible and the front and back cover images tie in together, but just as a block of text it sits strangely against the black paper cutout. If I’d had more time, I could have experimented both with the text and the back cover image entirely.
How did I develop my ideas and how could I have developed them differently?
After a session so heavily focused on hand-lettering, I felt almost pushed to create something that was centred on the lettering. That’s the main reason why my research and experimentation drew me towards the stencil-cut type.
I would have liked to have experimented a little further with my collage ideas, maybe: the images I had collated were all quite interesting and it seems a shame my process meant they didn’t make it into the final piece.
Were the media and techniques I explored successful?
I think a downfall with my collage pieces was that I tried to recreate them on PhotoShop from the start. It just doesn’t have the same feeling as the truly torn and cut work I had on one of my worksheets. A limitation of working with collage at any kind of scale is that I literally don’t have the money to be printing sheets and sheets of coloured images to experiment with – as much as I’d like to. This meant that my collage work was quite small, which would have been difficult to scale up at any sort of quality.
A way to solve this problem might have been working digitally from the start (so as not to lose anything in translation between traditional and digital). Alternatively, I could have created a series of pencil thumbnails with possible collage ideas and compositions on them, so when I did come to printing and collaging I had something in mind. This does take away from the freeform experimental approach, though.
Hey, maybe I could have printed off all of the work and cut it up but just photographed compositions I liked rather than sticking them down. That would mean I could still play around a lot, but would mean I could reuse images I liked rather than having to print a ton of duplicates.
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