September 21, 2009

Final Statement

a blue medley

It's pretty cool to see how this project began as tiny thumbnails and black canson paper circles, and has ended as a ring-bound, hand-made book. It represents all of the design elements that have been learned over the past several weeks, and holds the hours of hard work in it's little 6x9 pages.



Compositionally, there are many elements that hold this book together. I made an extended effort to use similar colours on each page, but made sure that they were varied enough to keep it from being too repetitive and boring. Finding images was an fun task too, and I have become very familiar with the staff at Half-Price Books, since I was there so often. I hope they don't think I'm weird for coming back to buy more ocean books every day. The orientation of the dots on the page was something that I had a LOT of fun with, and with each page it got easier and easier to come up with fun arrangements of images--tiny details like the directions that fish are facing, and the way that coral makes implied lines across the page.




The text/image overlays turned out pretty well, and it was interesting to see how each page looked when put together. While working with the type, I tried really hard to think of each composition independently from the dot composition it was destined to be paired with. This made the construction of the book even more exciting, as I got to see those "magic accidents" happen as the two halves worked well together.





I found myself looking through the lectures that Jamie had left on her blog a lot. Even looking through the design element pages helped me on both my type and dot compositions. I tried to pay extra attention to the elements as I continued the iterations in both classes, and work hark to make images that were both clear in their meaning and visually engaging. I've come a long way from the first set of black dots (comparing these compositions to the dots in my first viscom blog post, it's embarrassing how bad those are).




There are definitely things that could be improved about this book. That's not to say that I'm not proud of it though. I'm not very exact with measurements, and it's something that I need to continue to work on. Either that, or I need to get better at hiding my mistakes. I also wish that I had found some more imagery with similar colours to help tighten up the pages as a cohesive group. Looking through it now, I'm not too sure I'm ready to be any more critical of it yet. I just finished it today, and I'm still happy with it. I'll need to wait until after the critique and edit this.

1 comment:

  1. This final statement is great. The personal anecdotes, detailed descriptions of design processes, and integrated imagery is why I've selected your blog for the blogroll on designalogue. Keep it up.

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