Tuesday 5 March 2013

OUGD404 - Design Principles: What Is A Book? Final Design


Below is my final ten page spread printed and bound. I bought a selection of stock before printing and experimented on thin white card, medium white card and thick white card. The thin white card proved to be too transparent and with it being printed double sided, it meant that I could see the reverse side through each sheet of paper. This is why I then tried medium white card, which was much more professional in appearance. I tried to feed the thick stock through my printer, but it wouldn't go through very well and it got jammed half way through. I therefore decided that the medium stock was much more appropriate to use.
 
Although I did have a print slot booked in for when I go back to college after the Easter break, I decided that I most certainly wanted it to be completed before going back, as I have a lot of other work to do as well. I found that my printer at home was suitable to use, as I could achieve a high quality of print.
 
Once everything was printed, I then had to cut it all down to scale with a scalpel and make sure everything was aligned. I have a few issues with this, as my printer hadn't accurately printed each page. This meant that I had to crop certian pages down a little bit more to make sure they were all the same size.
 
I took the risk of printing each page without the grid on it, as I wanted to use the trace with the grid printed on instead, and insert them in between my white stock. Initially, I printed the trace off at A4 scale and tried to see whether I could insert a full A4 piece in between each leaf. I found however, that it was unnecessary to have a double page spread of the trace, and that it would work just as well with an A5 piece inserted. When I tried this, I decided that I would see what it looked like with every other page having the additional piece of trace. I found this worked really well, as I was able to create a publication which was unique as each page is slightly different and unpredictable.
 
Binding
Having never previously bound a book, I found this probably the most challenging task to overcome. I wanted to try and bind it as successfully as possible, to allow me to achieve the neatest, most professional outcome. I firstly marked out all of the holes I needed to pierce and then carefully used a needle to pierce them. I used a thick thread and fed it through each page, stitching through the top holes first and then the ones below. Luckily everything aligned perfectly, however I did have to repierce a few of the holes along the way because they weren't quite right to start with.
 
Considering this is my first time binding I am quite happy with the outcome. I looked at tutorials on the internet which helped quite a lot, but in the end I thought I would do it in a way that best suited my publication, and I quite like having the edge of the book revealed to show how all of the headers line up with the block black rectangles. Due to the stock I have used it is quite fragile, so if it had been produced for the industry it would have had to have been sent off to professional printers and the outcome would have been even more successful.
 
I was going to bind it in the same way as the publication shown in my research on my binding post, however the stock I used was too fragile to do it that way and it would have restricted my publication when opening each page as it would have been hard to measure how tight to make the additional string covering the edge of the book.
 










 








 
One issue I had with my final print out was the last page, as I must have resized the grid I had drawn and hadn't moved all of the lines, resulting in part of the grid appearing to be innacurate. I wouldn't have been able to reprint as I didn't have the available stock having done lots of trial and error developmental work prior to this. This is something that would be easily fixed and if I was designing this for the industry it would obviously be resolved straight away.

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