Final Book

Here is what the final book I made looks like. I had a few problems with printing the dark blue pages and had to tweak them and reprint the whole thing with edited colours. The front cover is screen printed with metallic gold paint, and this almost looks better than I expected, the gold really stands out against the dark background.

The stitching was also a problem, I ended up doing it once, then unpicking it all as it was too loose and the pages were not as flush as I wanted. I decided to use two sets of straight stitching at each end to hold it in place, then do the wavy stitches afterwards which ended up being a good solution.

1930s Japanese Poster Design

These posters are very effective in using just letter forms (all be it much more pictorial characters than English) to create a dynamic and engaging composition.

I can almost see the image above as a double page spread, with one page filled with the intricate and very heavy black text, and the other with much more dense text. The composition is dynamic and the bold section really captures your attention even though it probably has less to say. If I want a reader to look at an image before the text I could employ this technique of having a very big and bold image paired with more delicate type on the opposing page.

The huge difference in scale of the characters (or components) create a clear visual hierarchy, letting the viewer know there are 2 or more sets of text to be read separately.

Eli Craven

These snippets of photos are quite ghostly, they almost look like they are coming out of the paper from inside. They are so effective in their simplicity, and something similar could provide a change of pace in my version of the book.

Mock Ups

I'm starting to think about how I am going to out the final book together and how I can create something special that people would want to buy.

The way I am approaching the layout is that the further through the book you get the more abstract and disjointed the images get, as well as the text becoming more spaced out over pages and eventually getting warped itself.

Here are some spreads:

I've decided to keep the images to a very limited colour scheme of black, white and blue.

I am thinking about case binding the book with a cloth cover (also in dark blue) to make it feel like a genuine object as opposed to just some stapled sheets. I want to consider all elements of the design and may leave the spine open with it stitched like below (or similar using blue thread). It seems a shame to spend time stitching the pages together for it to just be covered by a spine so I think making the stitching a key part of the outside design is a good solution.

I am also intending to screen print the front cover in gold on the navy cloth, again to give it a very finished and 'proper' feel. The design will be very simple with either just text, or text and a pattern. I want the cover to look like a contemporary interpretation of an antique book cover, looking back to when books were very valuable and collectible objects.

Sam Winston

An artist that uses text in a very abstract and expressive way is Sam Winston. He manipulates the words and letter to the point that is is more image than it is text. This would be a very interesting way of taking the idea of the text breaking down and falling apart to another level and creating a version of the story that definitely wouldn't have been done before.

Text breakdown

An idea I have had in my head for a while is that of the text gradually breaking down or becoming harder to read as the story progresses.

I thought it would work best if it wasn't the individual characters that were affected (by changing font face or size for example) but the body of text as a whole. The method I came up with was warping the lines which the text sit on in Illustrator and gradually making it more and more extreme. It forces the reader into the position of someone who is drunk, or bobbing in water, with the lines constantly fluctuating.

I quite like the way that it turned out and actually learnt a lot about Illustrator in the process. I would love to see how the whole story would look if I were treat it like this - the warping would be much more gradual, and it might be a few pages before the reader realises what is happening. The last three lines of the first paragraph are particularly off-putting (in a way I want) because they wave a small amount, to the point where the reader may question whether they actually are, like an optical illusion.

The major downside to this technique is that it takes a VERY long time. I have to manually edit every line the text follows and them paste the actual text in place. I may revisit this idea if I know I have more time that I thought, or if it is the best solution in my opinion.

Tracing paper

Using layers to build up images is an effective way of conveying time and also memory. I wanted to see how I could address the passage of time and loss of memory through the design of the text without using accompanying imagery.

I designed and printed the text so that the story is only on the right hand page. As you read the text you can faintly see what is on the next page, which creates some confusion as you are presented with three layers of text over each other. The page on the left is still visible but mirrored, as as you turn more pages gets lost in more text and buried under more layers of tracing paper.

The intended effect of this was for the page you are reading to be clear, and pages you are going to read or have read getting fainter and fainter the further from the point in the story you are at. This relates directly to the passing of time and memory of the main character. Memories of past events fade as you progress, only the present is clear, and even that isn't without confusion.

Portrait book mock-up

This mock-up uses some of the images I have created through my experimentation over the past weeks. This was mostly just to put some of the things from my sketchbook in a book format (and alongside text) to see how well they function as interiors.

I had a hard time choosing which illustrations to use as I could only pick 5 for this layout (an illustration every other spread). Because of this I chose to use illustrations that were created from one portrait - one that could be Ned. When I tried using some of the other photos it didn't relate to the text as much as I wanted it to, and felt truly random like I had just thrown images in here and there for no reason.

The illustrations look good next to the text and I like the fact that it is consistently black and white, if I were to add colour I'm not too sure how I would go about it. However, because of the very regular placement of the images (every other right hand page) and because they all the same portrait edited in various ways the pacing is fairly slow and it almost becomes predicable after the first few pages.

There are definite moments at which I want to surprise the reader and make them feel shocked or disorientated through the images to reflect certain moments in the story at which Ned finds himself questioning himself or finds out something isn't the way he believed it to be.

Glitches

One of the ways of degrading an image is through editing the code of the file and creating glitch art. These images are unpredictable and give a genuine sense of something going wrong as it is often unwanted and unexpected when we come across images that look like these do. Because of this I think these images are particularly successful in conveying the breakdown of memory.

There is also the contradiction of the time the story is set (and the era the photos were taken) and the very obviously modern and digital effects that have been applied. This adds to the confusion the images create. 

In the image above I especially like just how unclear the original photo is. I think my experiments have been most successful when there is just a glimpse of the original, and the rest is distorted or covered. All together they give lots of  hints towards the tangible reality of a photo, but what they add up to is still unclear - like a series of scenes in a film that give an overall impression of the place or atmosphere, but leave the story open to interpretation.

Memory experiments

I have continued to experiment more with how to visually represent Ned's gradually failing memory, but using photographic portraits of people from the 1950s (when the story was set). These people could be the various characters that Ned encounters on his journey, but they are confused memories of them, and therefore distorted in various ways. This gives the reader small snapshots as to what Ned might remember, and because they started as photographs it gives it a sense of authenticity and a definite place and era.

Stephen J Shanabrook

These photos are actually stills from a video piece by Stephen J Shanabrook in which he shreded photographs and dropped them through a clear oil solution. The fragments of images slowly drift down past the camera, overlapping with each other.

This is a very concise visual metaphor for memories, or small fragments of the past which have lost their place in time and are swimming around in our heads.