Tonya Mazaeva

Process Book binding

Printed cover of my process book

I wanted to convey the style of the spreads by adding colour to some of the letters on the cover. Later, I added lines to the background to show the messiness of my process.

I continued designing and prototyping the pages, making sure that everything is working.

As my designs have a lot of bright pinks and reds, I decided that the right thing to do would be to balance them out with a calm and slightly cool green or blue. To avoid making the design too boring, I decided to highlight all the vowel letters in the headings. 

There’s An App For That preview

Here’re some raw photos of my cover for the Don’t Judge a Book By its Cover project. 

I'm still not happy with the colour scheme, I feel like the colours of each project don't really go together, so maybe I should pick one for the whole book and not worry about the shades and how everything will look together. 

- its too late to make big changes to the style of my process book, so try to work with what I have

I'm finally happy with the size of the text, but now I feel like I have too much pink. My original idea was to take the main colours of my projects and use them to design the pages in each chapter, but I think I'll step back from that idea and use just one colour, otherwise the coloured spreads draw too much attention to themselves and distract from the projects themselves.

I chose a dark colour for the background to make it easy to use at night. Bright buttons were added for the same reason - I wanted to make it bright enough for a person whose concentration is lost. 

I am continuing to add more content to my process book and making sure that no visual elements are to small to be seen. 

I wanted to add a colour to the headings that can be found in every project. So, for "Food Types" I chose the pink colour of the letters O and added a text box in the middle, but later I thought that such a layout might be perceived as inappropriate, so I had to make changes to it. I thought the other option was to hide the text box under the bottom bar of the letter F and make that letter pink to keep the original concept. Also, this option fits better with the Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover principle, as it ignores the outer margins.

I realised that on the previous spreads, everything looked very compressed and small. I had to rethink the main purpose of my technology book, which is to showcase my experiments and my projects, rather than focusing on how to fit everything on one spread. So on these spreads I have made the main designs larger to direct the viewer to the main aspects of my projects, thus adding a good hierarchy. In my previous spreads, it was difficult to see what was pictured, which was not helpful for the presentation of the work.

This typeface better represents my personality and actually looks like my handwriting

I was most fascinated by the projects of Njoki Gitahi, Oded Ezer, Coca Albers and El Fantasma de Heredia. These designers approach their creative process in different ways, which shows that there is a huge range of possibilities when it comes to creating their work. I love how some of them find their inspiration in mistakes and sloppy sketches, while others create a large number of neat samples and then choose the best from them. The way these designers handle shapes and textures and experiment with materials is the level of boldness and creativity I want to achieve in my work. For example, I've always wanted to experiment with cyanotype, like Coca Albers does with leaves and letters. This book showed me once again that an area of design such as typography, which seems difficult to get away with because of the need to make the letters recognisable, still contains a lot of creative solutions.

I also tried applying some colour, but decided it was better to leave everything black and white for now and see if I would lack colour in my process book later.