Sarah Wong

Week 13: Final Book

When I first decided to make a pop-up book at the beginning of the semester I was nervous that I had bitten off more than I could chew but I’m thankful for the challenge and all the skills I’ve learned along the way. Prototyping has been such an important step throughout my entire process from experimenting until the very end in finalising all my measurements and folds. I actually had to print off my book twice because the thick paper stock I had chosen changed some aspects of my pop-ups, even the jacket of the book (I had to widen the spine to hold the inner pages in a neater manner).

Week 13: Screen printing

Our final class was last week but Chloe and I came in today to screen print posters for the Wifi Library with our vinyl cut design (which Astro helped to put through in week 12). I haven’t done this since high school so it was super fun to revisit a method that I haven’t had the opportunity to play around with in so long. We had some amazing results, I particularly love the look of the white ink on the warm stock we chose (bottom left photo). After screen printing for a while, I tried some new orientations of the poster by turning it landscape, and pulling the screen printing squeegee halfway (bottom right photo). I accidentally pulled the ink over the word ‘library’ but I found the result to be quite interactive, you have to work and concentrate a bit to read the word properly.

Week 12: Final prints

After printing out my designs on 300 gsm paper and trying to stick it all together I realised that it was too thick and stiff which compromised the structural integrity of the book. I reprinted it on 210 gsm which was a lot easier to work with.

Week 12: Cover + Prototyping finals

After finishing my digital collages I printed them out to size along with all the pop-out pieces to make sure they all worked and stuck together. Andy suggested going to the print shop and asking for some samples of their stock so that I had the chance to make sure my designs would work on thicker paper as well.

I’ve finished the designs for the jacket of my book. I collaged together photos of control panels, buttons and switches (mostly of devices from the 90′s) to communicate the idea of Control. Since I’ll be binding it myself, I made the dimensions of the jacket 4mm larger than the inner pages to make room for the pop-ups that will thicken the book. I suspect I might have to widen it more but I’ll have to test that with the paper stock I decide to use.

Week 12: wifibook.club

After brainstorming names for the Situational Library, we collectively agreed that ‘Wifi Library’ is a more self explanatory and memorable name. When searching for a domain, we managed to purchase ‘wifibook.club’ which I believe encompasses our library’s sense of community and collaboration well, as one of our goals was to create a space for the staff and students of building 9 to share materials and resources. 

Weel 11: CTRL + W

CTRL + W is a command I often use to quickly close pop up ads, as taking the time to use my track pad and navigate across the screen to click the close button results in the pop up loading and playing distracting music/sounds. Often when I’m walking in the city I’m overwhelmed by advertising, whether on public transport or around Melbourne Central, I’ve always thought that a shortcut like CTRL + W would be helpful to escape these overcrowded spaces.

Week 11: CTRL + S

For me, CTRL + S is a shortcut we use to save memories, moments and photos. During a one-on-one with Andy, he recommended looking through my phone’s photos for inspiration, and after doing a bit of peeking on my friends’ phones too, I noticed reoccurring subject matter mostly included photos of food, friends and Melbourne sunsets.

Week 11: Pop-up progress

Week 11: Situational Library Progress

This week we got to work with Karen and show her the wireframing and other ideas we had in mind for the Wifi Library. She walked us through how the library would work and the options we had for details such as navigating around the different pages. She also highlighted that graphics for situations such as error pages or icons for buttons needed to be created which Chloe and I will be working on for the next week.

It was so so exciting to have some tangible results for our project, as most of the things we've been working on leading up to this have been email writing/responding and digital designing so to see the library up and running was definitely the highlight of this class.

Week 11: Research

My local library introduced this app called Borrow Box a couple of years ago and I remember resisting the change at the time as I preferred being able to read off a physical book however I now am an avid iBooks advocate - it’s so convenient to be able to carry hundreds of books on my phone and I love being able to pull it out wherever I am, particularly on public transport without having to carry the weight of a hardcover book around with me everywhere I go.

Week 10: Personal project inspiration + process

At the beginning of the week I walked past a restaurant in Windsor which used a huge collage of old magazines and newspaper clippings as wallpaper (top two photos). I loved the bursts of colour they had in a cohesive but historic manner. For my personal project Control, I focus on our impatient behaviour when we experience a lack of control in inconvenient situations and how it is unique to the people of the post-digital era as we are so used to quickly and easily fixing things at the press of a button. I wanted to draw attention to how this behaviour is common and prominent our contemporary daily lives by contrasting it with images, visuals and colours which are clearly from the past, similarly to this restaurant’s wallpaper.

Week 10: Whole of Discipline Lecture

This week’s whole of discipline lecture tied in really well to our Wot is a Book studio. Australian artist, writer and filmmaker Shaun Tan (best known for his award winning picture book The Lost Thing) came in to speak to us about his work and his processes, and as my personal project is in the style of a children’s pop-up book, I found his lecture to be quite insightful.

He spoke about how he originally had a ‘snobbish’ look towards children’s literature but has come to realise that they often understand more than adults and his publishers and editors, and that they are brutally honest.

Week 10: Vinyl Cutting

At the beginning of class we came together as a group and went over a plan for the rest of the day. Astro was working on his website design and showed Chloe and I how to use the program he works with to create the code for his ideas (top left photo) while Chloe and I went over what we were planning to vinyl cut along with the posters and potential stock we were thinking of printing on.

Week 9: Paper Prototyping

I found a really great youtube channel called The Pop-Up Channel to learn how to make some pop-ups which I may potentially use in my book.

This week I started using scrap paper, cardboard and tape to experiment with the different pop ups I could incorporate into my work. An issue that I kept running into was making the pop-up successfully only to have it stick out of the book once it was closed (top row of photos) - this is something I’ll have to keep testing until I get it right.

Something I really wanted to allude to in my work was the cyclic nature of our itch to control and its constant presence in our lives. I’d like to try portraying this through a wheel pop-up which cycles through all the keyboard shortcuts (bottom row of photos) that I’ll be basing the other pop-ups on and to have it visible on every page; these keyboard shortcuts will have a constant presence throughout the book, similarly to how we constantly want to control even the smallest of inconveniences in our lives.

Week 9: Library at the Dock round 2 + Wireframing

This week we revisited the Library at the Dock to support the pop-up library group. While they were presenting, our group came together to continue working on the Situational Library.

Astro had come up with wireframes for the Situational Library’s website, and I had also given it a go after what he’d taught me (image above). It was really interesting to compare my outcomes with his, as I realised mine were a bit too polished for this stage of the digital design but it was still a good way to visually communicate my ideas to the rest of the group.

Week 8: Presentations + Situational Library Posters

This week we listened to the Pop-up library and Exhibition groups before presenting to the rest of the Wot is a Book cohort what we’d been up to these past couple of weeks. Previously I had only gotten glimpses of each group prototyping and discussing from across the classroom so to hear about our friends’ processes and what they’ve been working on has been really interesting and exciting. For our presentation, we broke it up into five key questions that we then answered:

1. What is the project?

Short Answer: A digital library through a wifi network for all to access

Long answer: A Situational Library is a non-physical, digital library that involves users connecting to a public Wi-Fi network that allows anyone (within its proximity) to access a range of books and other material.

2. Why did you choose this project?

It challenges the traditional idea of a library as a physical space and is an environment where the students and staff of building 9 can come together to share and collaborate resources. It presents the opportunity to create an ongoing project which may be adapted and grown by future students.

3.    What are you intending to do?

Expected Outcomes:

A library accessible through a wifi network

Student/teacher interaction with the library

Stretch Goals:

We would like the library to be something continuous and growing even after the project has finished.

4.    What are your processes (how and when)?

Work has been loosely split up based on interest so that we can move between tasks, collaborate and learn new skills. Being a smaller group, communication between class is quick and easy - if we come up with something outside of class, we can send photos and ideas to each other and get responses/group approval promptly, since we only have 3 members.

5.    What have you discovered (so far)?

Teachers respond in their different times and relying on teachers to respond pushes back deadlines - we need to organise ourselves around this so that we’re not too unproductive

Unsure of parameters, bit speculative – exciting but also daunting

Branding: Are we legally allowed to include RMIT’s logo/branding in our work?