Although I think these were quite helpful, I find it much easier to just work on the computer. This allows me to be much quicker and more efficient, as I can just copy things and move things around whilst inserting placeholder text etc. However, I found this useful as it allowed me to see what the size of the books would be. I think this is a nice size, not too big and not too small.
I then decided to continue working on this on InDesign, experimenting with lay-outs and various other design elements. I have kept the layout very similar to that of my hand-drawn explorations, the final design looking like this:
After I had finally come to a decision on which design I preferred, I inserted all of my titles and began inserting some vectors in order to see whether I wanted to use this type of illustration within my books. As you can see from the images above, I also implemented my idea of using a gradient to represent how far along the alphabet you were, which I thought worked nicely and was very subtle. This was then printed and very quickly bound (not very well), with a blank cover on. This is what I took to my final crit and showed.
I received good feedback from the final crit, saying that everything seems to be going in the right direction and I should continue as I am. One piece of feedback I received regarding whether or not I should use imagery within the book said that 'photographs would over complicate the design and detract from its simplicity' which I completely agree with, and think that the use of imagery may interfere with the clean, dictionary like appearance of the rest of the book.
From this feedback, I then made quite a few alterations. I didn't like the appearance of the book any more, and made some drastic changes. Here is some of the stages that I went through, including looking at whether or not I should include imagery:
I decided that I wanted to keep my book as simple and clean as possible, which meant that I had to remove the boxes that were around each of the titles and page numbers.
I kept the gradient at the top of the page, and I also liked having something on the sides of each page as I felt that this really balanced out all of the content across the entire spread. However, although I do actually like the imagery, I agree with the feedback I had already got. I think it will start to over complicate the book and would also be very hard to find imagery for some things such as bulk and GSM. With this is mind, I simply removed the images page and had the next word straight after, making it much more dictionary like.
Now that I have my final layout sorted, all that was left was inserting the content that I have gathered from other sources. Once this had been done, I printed and bound my books. This is how the finals look:
As you can see, due to the last minute binding that I had to use, due to very poor time management, the back edge of the page is very hard to see:
However, this is all down to my lack of time management and wouldn't have been an issue if I had allowed myself more time to complete the binding properly. This is something I have had trouble with in the past and need to consider for future projects.
Ambiton:
Exploration:
Discovery:
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