Now that I had some hand on experience with on how a book could be formatted for print, I started thinking about how I could edit my existing layouts to better suit the placement of elements across a double page spread. I chose two exercises to return to that had the most developed content and that could be easily adjusted using their existing photoshop files.
Editing Exercise 1.5: Research & Development
My Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover Illustration originally looked too crowded with the large text overshadowing the illustration on a portrait cover. With this new revision however, I reduced the title text in size and moved it away from the main illustration so that they don't distract from one another. I changed the first letter to gold to act as a visual link to the orb so that the viewer would moving diagonally across the page at first glance before reading the main article.
I used a guiding line on these revisions to indicate where the centre fold would be so that there wouldn't be any important information overlapping where it could be harder to read against the curve. As I didn't have an article to go with this sheet, I used placeholder lorum ipsum text to fill out the rest of the page as I imagine the space could be filled.
This image could still use some balancing to make the text better suit the background as although the main text may still be legible in white, it soon starts to fade into the brighter section of the background nearer the centre. Overall though, I'm still much happier with it than before and I feel the image now has a solid impact thanks to the new relationships I've built using the same original elements.
Editing Exercise 1.2: The Future Of The Book
The second option I returned to was my Future of Books image, where this time I spread a large title image across two pages. To avoid the centre fold, I readjusted the positioning on the original widescreen screenshot from the film so that the figure now has his head on one side while the book monolith felt safe to be left central as a low detail but important object.
The Kindle and the iPhone could then be repositioned so that they were more clearly visible on each page and the title text could be kept in relatively the same space as it points inwards to draw attention to the central focus of the image. I enjoyed putting a dramatic image like this as a large and bold centrepiece, but it did restrict some of the room below it by leaving close to one third of the page left as remaining space for written content.
Unlike the previous exercise, here I did have a large body of my own writing relating to the subject that I could play with. The original was written to be seen in a blog format, but to keep things short and effective for a pamphlet, I only used my closing thoughts from the essay which slotted in quite well at an appropriate font size.
I enjoyed revising these two images as I found clearer design objectives for my content by knowing exactly where and how it would be displayed. I like having parameters and limitations to inform my process, which is why I sometimes struggle when given open briefs such as the original exercises these designs came from.
I definitely want to anchor myself around a physical form in future projects and I'll take note of how a book will be throughout the brainstorming process. Also, although I feel comfortable enough with using photoshop guidelines to arrange content in this way, I feel that I would benefit from learning more about desktop publishing programs such as InDesign that could speed up my workflow when working on layouts digitally.
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