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In the end I went on a bit of a tangent with the deconstruction project. I was focusing less and less about taking apart the object and started to look at the decisions behind the design of it and why we might like or dislike something innocent like a item of stationary equipment.

I did physically take the thing apart though.

It is definitely a stapler, not much else, however the aesthetics are are pretty odd. Why are their randoms curves and indents and fancy things on the case?

The idea revolves around this link between the two halves of the book. The first idea I had was to link every page, but that began to be unfeasable when I started trimming down the different pages and having a lack of things to relate to one another in a way that didnt seem forced. 

I instead chose two sub-subjects that linked nicely.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/10/what_are_darwin078491.html]

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/07/ideas-bank/finally-a-future-proof-file-back-up-format

From this I began to develop my overarching theme. One half would be based on nature having elements of what we would call artificial technology, and the other as the opposite, yet still entirely related, which is humans using what has been perfected by evolution and natural systems in technology.

I found these prints made by designer Josh Brill. the prints reminded me of what me made in the workshops with Mark and Mark.

I began to really think about the two words and how they could be linked together. What I have been researching, the reports and articles, did loosely involve them both but I really need a theme or something persistent throughout the book. A narrative or message.

I happened to remember some time ago that I watched a program on TV. I can't remember the name but it was about natural materials and functions being used in modern science right now.

The Bookbinding workshop was extremely helpful, it covered the basics of creating a simple book, we made three different books in the session.

The first was a simple one. Just some  thicker card encasing the thinner pages attached with staples, afterwards it was sliced up on the electric guillotine to finish and make it neat and even along the edges.

After that things got a bit cray and we were told how to make a double book kinda thing. Two books connected with an encompassing cover around the two. Three spines altogether really. For this one the larger spine was a fold, the spines for two sides were stitched up.

Final book is a hard back. This is stapled, like the first before the cover goes on. The cover is glued onto the top pages using thicker cardboard. A strip of book  linen is glued over the spine and then a final sheet of thin card finishes it off. Then it's cropped on the slicer.

The second part of letterpress involved using the, now laser cut letters, with the presses in the print room. as a smallgroup we planned a design to print. Each of the 6 prints would have to be done in three layers, one for each letter.

We decided that the T should be dominant, with the E and the O leaning off the T, like so.

The letters are inked up with a roller and then set on the press. We had a lot of trouble with positioning. With more time and planning maybe there would be ways to make it less difficult but we just did as many prints as possible in the time we had. They all ended up really nice looking, but none were as perfect as we had originally hoped them to be, with no overlaps and the E resting on the stem of the T.

Even though they all were either overlapping too much or too far from the T, I personally really liked the indentation seen from the reverse of the paper.

It's got that embossed effect going on.

After studying the layouts in Creative Review our second task was to chose one of the pages from one of the magazines and blow it up into a canvas of cardboard boxes, this would involve ratios and other maths related things that I hardly understood because I'm not a maths genius.

The first thing we had to discern was how much each element of the page would have to be enlarged in order to be correctly marked on the boxes. This was done by dividing a length of the box-workspace thing by a length of the Creative Review page. I can't remember what it was so lets say the width/height of the boxes were 174cm and the width/height of the book was about 24cm so 174 divided by 24 would give us our ratio, which was 7.25. Everything on the page had to be scaled up(times-ed by) 7.25.

After that whole saga was complete the exercise was fairly simple and we managed to setup the 12 columns ready to start marking in the objects on the page. We were to mark images with the crossed-box in dark grey tape, text as lines with black tape(aligned right/ragged left) and captions in light grey tape.

This is our creation half finished, from a dynamic angled shot.

The fully finished up-scaled-magazine-page-wall with a cheeky looking man displaying the page we were enlarging.

As a smaller exersise in we designed a poster for a missing dog advert. We were given two images and some text to use to make a poster using a 12 column document with a 3mm bleed.

This is the finished poster. I really like the look of it and I feel it displays the message well. 'Lost dog' grabs the attention. The images are large and the most important information, immediately at least is towards the top, with more information below if the viewer recognizes the dog and requires contact information.

Went for a sans serif bold-ish font for obvious reasons. Clear and easy to read but looks good in my opinion, which is the most important aspect of a missing pet poster.

In the second workshop we moved onto the use of master pages and paragraph styles. These are things that make life easier for designing for layouts with many pages. Master pages are, for me, much like templates used in web design which I am somewhat familiar with.

Paragraph styles allow for changes on a large scale, text is grouped into things like main body, headings, captions, and subheading. Editing the style will change all the text in the 'book' associated with that style. Very handy for things like magazines and books.

Some layouts of around 10 in the book document I made in the workshop

There is a different style for main text, heading, subheading, image caption and quotes.

Liking this page on the right. The way she's balanced the page and made it work, despite the size of each paragraph being very different.

Not being content with my old hand-made hybog poster, I've started planning a new one. I start by mapping the page, using one of the fonts for now, the sans-serif font is Tunga bold.

Here I have just started to slap some of the Georgia font into the mix. Rather than the cut and stick approach I went with before, I'm having a go at free handing it because I like to make life difficult for myself.

I start to experiment with different, more illustrative ways of breaking up the text. I like the idea of this stretching/ripping but cant get it to just look right, I have a go at this organic tear a couple more times before I move on.

Inspired a bit by Greg Coultons style of lettering I start to draw chains and make the bottom of the serif font look heavy and metallic, maybe representing how the line of thought that is being opposed in the quote can hold people down, keeping them too grounded.

In the second layout workshop we started to look at the grid, moving on from just basic layout aesthetics we were creating last week.

The first exercise had us looking at magazine spread designs, in my case the magazine was creative review. 

We were shown some examples of simple looking sketches of layouts. made up of lines of text, crossed boxes for images and headings/subheading placeholders. Not only were we studying layouts, we pretty much just learned how to quickly design layouts for future projects.

Ours differed to the ones shown as we are looking at the use of the grid in the magazine so I jotted down faint column lines to work out how many columns/hanglines are on each page. 

The Creative Review generally worked with 8 or 12 columns,

The 12 row grid allows larger bodies of text to go across a smaller body one and a half times. On this page there are 6 columns of smaller text at the bottom, the larger text above it fits into the system 4 times, each one of those is one and a half times the size of the smaller one.

This is basically what goes on in my head when working out each page.

Neat way of getting the content to sit well next to the image. The angling of the heading/paragraphs is so simple.

After the crit I picked up on some things that I didn't think of when designed these posters. Although the brief keeps us to black and white, we could invert the colours. So I gave that a go and I loved it. It might just be because its simply something different to look at, but I still like it a lot so i'm gonna stay with it, for my digital piece at least.

I also decided to go a bit more playful with the text, probably no where near playful enough but I feel like it's progress, applying so warp effects to the now outlined text, I had to be careful that it didn't completely distort the words, I feel I struck a nice balance, keeping it legible but... interesting. Keeping 'necessary' un-warp-effected hopefully portrays a message. Necessary is boring.

Maybe I should have kept it non-hybridized.

I also started playing around with different layouts, perhaps a more considered layout for my hand made poster, not sure yet.