Anthology
The Ramblings of a Mad Man The Reflective Writings of a final year Graphic Design student
by James Iredale
Covering Modules: DN6031
James Iredale
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Anthology Statement of Intent
What excites you about the brief? The experience of creating a book especially for print is a really useful skill to include on a design portfolio. I’m looking forward to developing my knowledge around adobe indesign and the best practices that are used when creating a book. I’m interested in researching the principles that come with typesetting, and how designers use them to ensure consistent and quality design throughout their pieces.
What Prior learning can draw upon to work on this project? I remember doing a type oriented session with Sara during the beginning of second year - creating a poster within InDesign based off one of our previous blog posts. For sure the principles that come with forming a consistent grid system through the publication, utilizing principles potentially such as the golden ratio within book design will be something to think about for this year’s anthology.
What themes, materials, processes and research sources will you explore in the project? As a group, we really liked the idea of growth as a journey for our theme, so I’m excited to see how we could potentially include this within the creation of the anthology project. In terms of cover design, it’s considered as seperate process and a certain art form. I’m interested in exploring cover designers and illustrators like Joan Wong and David Pelham.
What skills and techniques would you like to develop and use for the project? I’d definitely like to develop my skills around typesetting during this project as I think it’ll be vital for many different purposes in the commercial world of design. I’d also like to gain a further understanding of the different grid systems and how they can be best implemented in design processes like book and magazine design.
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Book Design
Anthology
Ideally I wouldn’t mind being the winning group for this year’s anthology, however reflecting on last years I think I’d rather spend the time focussing on studio projects (in particular my FMP). As a group we certainly want to be able to produce a high quality of work that represents not only our abilities as designers but would also represent the student body work of the university (in every creative field) in the right way that would do them justice as well as ourselves.
Examples of specific practitioners you will have to research the project. I have already touched on cover designers like Joan Wong (cover designer of the novel series ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and David Pelham (legendary penguin cover designer for the cult classic Clockwork Orange). Other cover designers I’m interested in researching more about in particular are the likes of Rodrigo Corral with his designs for Turtles All The Way Down. His abstract style is renowned for cutting through the noise of the busy world of cover design.
Define your audience. How will you reach them/interact with them? At the end of the day, the audience for the anthology is predominantly the students of London Met university. As has been said by the tutors, this is an opportunity particularly for the creative writing students to showcase their work and should be treated as if it were a performance. As this is a university run project - the audience members will include all stakeholders of the university, potential students wanting to join, alumni students and teachers, etc.
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What is the scope of your ambition for the project?
Anthology
Structure
The first research that I conducted was around the very process of designing a book: What aspects do we need to consider when designing one? Who are some prominent designers? What is the common layout for book design? As well as looking at some examples of appealing cover design.
Typesetting Typesetting is the process of setting text onto a page. Typesetting is vital when designing a book and key element of visual communication. The process determines the makeup of a book - determining the size of the margins, stylizing the chapters, a consistent typeface and font size. “While the very basics of these things can be tackled in a book formatting software, a professional typesetter will go above and beyond, catching and fixing technical issues such as whitespace rivers and ladder”.
Typography From my research I can see that typesetting and typography aren’t the same thing. However well thought out typography is still vital to a book designing project. It is the art of text creation - choice of font and use of space.
Structure Font matter: typically includes author, publisher information, and copyright information. It might also include a: dedication, epigraph, epilogue, preface, foreword, or table of contents. Body: is the bulk of the book, and its where the main content goes: the story or the non-fiction test Back matter: fills in any lingering information the reader might want, such as an epilogue, afterword, appendix, glossary of terms, etc. Trim Size: the standard sizes for fiction are 4.25” x 6.87”, 5” x 8”, 5.25” x 8”, 5.5” x 8.5”, 6” x 9. While in non-fiction, it’s 5.5” x 8.5”, 6” x 9”, 7” x 10”.
Designing a Cover The dimensions of a cover will obviously be determined by the proposed dimensions of the entire book. However it’s still important to factor in some ground rules that can be implemented before deciding on the book size. The rules to consider include: Trim Width x2 / Spine Width / Bleed of about 3mm..
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1. Book Design : Research Typesetting and
Anthology
Back Cover: It’s easy to forget about the back cover, but it’s important to the process of designing a book. The back cover usually provides essential information, a synopsis or a summary of what text the book contains. Therefore, it should get a similar amount of thought to the process of what design to put onto it. This blog post predominantly covers the aspects that are needed to be considered when designing the covers of a book. A follow up blog post will discuss my research around some prominent cover designers.
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Front Cover: Don’t judge a book by its cover. Except in this case, please do. Creating book covers is a seperate skill in design. Some of the aspects that need to be considered before designing a book include what sort of feel are you going for with the book, finding inspiration for the book cover, whos going to be reading it (the audience), choosing the right images for the book, choosing the right typography for the cover, and of course exporting (pdf for print).
Anthology
Joan Wong Joan Wong has a vast and impressive portfolio of works to her name including creating the book cover series for ‘Crazy Rich Asians’. Her style ranges from simplistic illustrations, to incorporating structured grid systems and bold typography. She is the owner and founder of the studio JoHoWo with a focus of creating thoughtful visual narratives as a response. Wong has worked for some of the largest names in publiushing including Penguin Random House where she designed the covers for H.G. Wells, Samantha Irby, and Jonathan Lethem.
Jaya Miceli Jaya Miceli is a book cover designer, illustrator, and the art director for Scribner. Her strong use of typography can be seen in many of her designs. However her practice and degree related field of interest is in illustration
Kimberly Glyder Glyder is a book cover specialist with multiple awards to her name. She has a recognisable style of illustration and can be seen in the majority of the book covers that she has designed. Her use of colour is a prominent feature, with consistent pantones used throughout her covers. Her client list includes the likes of Graywolf Press, Random House, Ecco, and National Geographic.
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2. Book Design : Researching Cover Designers
Anthology
David Pelham has not only illustrated but also written a plethora of children’s books. He is best known for the much loved Sam’s Sandwich series of books. He was Art Director at Penguin Books from 1968 to 1979 and created some of the publisher s most celebrated cover art. However his most notable piece has to be his illustration of the cult classic ‘Clockwork Orange’ in 1972. “Pity the poor designer who has to create a new cover for Anthony Burgess’s novel when David Pelham’s Penguin cover” (Coulthart, 2012).
Rodrigo Corral Corral is a celebrated designer, partnering with talent such as Junot Diaz, Jay-Z, Deepak and Sanjiv Chopra, Chuck Palahniuk, Tory Burch, Gianna Angelopoulos, Gary Shteyngart, Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, and organizations such as the Criterion Collection, New York Magazine and The New York Times. While Rodrigo’s style is diverse, each project carries enough permanence to cut through today’s noise and rise above the current trends.
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David Pelham
Anthology
Book.
During a taught session we split into groups and started reading different processes relating to creating a book. From reading this, we were able to see the process and the different methods that can be used (such as creating a typeface with scanning and illustrating) to create books to different budgets and how your own experiences can be used to further create a book identity.
As a group we started exploring the 5 topics that we were given: Voices // Transformation // Creation // Contrast // The Unexpected. We wrote down the words that we associated with these and then highlighted the focus topics to the ones that we want to pursue further. We then played around with the different ways we could layout the book. We liked the idea of using simple illustrations throughout with a playful text (InDesign picture taken by Bich Dang).
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3. Book Design : Studio Session - How to Create a
Anthology
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As the tutors said, students could use this work almost as performance. To represent this, we’ve discussed the idea of using simple rotoscope illustrations to represent the topics generated by a QR code. The main books we looked at during the session were: The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst and Book Typography by Mitchell and Wightman.
Anthology
Today’s session was group feedback with Angharad. I feel as though we had quite a lot to talk about and to run through our ideas with the tutor was useful. We haven’t had a lot of time to work on the anthology with other projects both studio and work ready being quite hectic. However we were able to clear a few things up. We discussed the possibility of getting creative with the way that we could bind the anthology for this year. Angharad emphasised the importance of wanting to make this year’s publication different to the previous years - so traditional formatting and presenting wasn’t necessarily what she wanted. We discussed the possibility of separating the chapters through different binding or folding techniques. One idea in particular that I liked was the idea of having secret / further information located within the folds of the chapters if we included French Folding. This idea went against what Big, Gemma and me wanted to do, as initially our thoughts were to create a tidy and traditionally presented publication. However, it is definitely something that we can research further. I particularly liked what the tutors said about how this anthology is a way of students to present their work, taking real pride in the stories that they were telling. As if it were a performance. My practice this year and last has focussed heavily on the process of animation and that statement got me thinking that including animation as part of the anthology could be a really nice touch - and it would be something different to previous anthology submissions. The idea could be carried out using QR codes that could prompt people to hover over with their phones in order to make the page come alive with rotoscope style animations. Angharad thought the idea was cool but would definitely need working out how this could be made to look appealing - QR blocks at the end of the day don’t look visually pleasing. We spent a lot of our meeting speaking about the idea of incorporating illustrations in the book in general. Gemma’s line based illustrations were the way that we wanted to go, progressing forwards and agreed that she would create some mockups based on the 5 chapters for the anthology.
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4. Book Design : Feedback Session
Anthology
Presenting
We as a group agreed very early on that we wanted to have a style of illustration that was quite minimal - relying heavily on the line work and a monotonal colour palette (perhaps just black and white or at a push incorporating a bold pantone of red). This style would work nicely with the idea of creating rotoscope animations if we wanted to go down that route as well. After the group had decided the overall theme and style of the anthology, I created a Gantt chart for us to work on so that we could keep on top of all of our individual responsibilities, as well as being on top of deadlines.
Binding I was asked to research some of the different methods that we could use for binding. One of my favourites that I found was the Do’s a Dos style of binding. Another idea that we considered was to have the different styles of bindings as a way of separating each of the 5 chapters. For example, we could do a fold out style of binding for one chapter and the french fold for another. However, in the end we decided that we wanted to keep a polished look throughout the book and decided it would be best to continue with a perfect bound book.
Cover Design We wanted the illustrations to feature heavily throughout the book. One of Gemmas initial ideas of a seed transforming into life could fit really well into the whole idea of the anthology. We wanted to show the book as some sort of journey, giving the students an opportunity to tell their story.
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5. Book Design : Mockups, Illustrations and
Anthology
I was asked to have a look at some of the typographic options. For book design, its common belief that serif fonts are the way forward if you are creating a book designed for print. However, when viewing online, sans serif are usually betteer and work nicely for a contemporary style. I looked at a few of both including Helvetica Neue, Baskerville, Sabon, Garamond and Caslon. However, in the end we decided it would be better to go for one font that could be used for headings and body copy in different weights.
Layout Bic was mainly responsible for the layout of the book. During class, we decided we wanted really large margins so we could include little illustrations around the book - further adding some visual narrative to the anthology. This idea was similar to the sort of designs you would find in medieval books. However, those illustrations were in quite a lot of detail; we still wanted to keep them minimal line based drawings. We explored the idea of having 2 columns for one page as body text similar to how you see in essay writings - however in the end we decided to go for one main column of text with large margins.
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Typography
Anthology
Elevator Pitch An identity that presents the stories shows the creative growth and new stories of students at The Cass & London Met University
Front Cover Illustrations meant to represent the growth of a student at London Met schools (Little nod to them with the recognition on the front cover) Title is Handwritten to fit in with the thin line illustration style of the anthology
Front and Back Cover Perfect Bound book as an A5 format - Good for short runs (printing on demand) / Offers a clean visual appeal that works with the illustrations / Easy binding for recycled material (maybe?) Back Cover is minimalistic (place to nicely put a price / information sticker?) Soft cover - Casewrap 115gsm gloss laminated on white Inner pages - Uncoated Recycled paper 100 gsm on white
Typography Typography - Lucida typeface is used. Lucida Sans Regular: Body Copy Lucida Sans Bold: Subtitle & Page no. Lucida Serif Reg: Author recognitions and further publishing information
Chapter Divisions and Body Copy Chapter Divisions done by a double page illustration spread with title (could be good to have the titles in the same sort of handwritten font as the anthology title?) 6x5 grid system for the page layouts for the body Body copy can be single column or double column depending on the length of the stories. In Margins with a lot of space there will be added ‘doodles’ similar to the plants of the front cover.
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6. Book Design : The Final Product
Anthology
Working as a group was a lot of fun. From previous experiences group work hasn’t always worked out as well as I had hoped (cough cough). However the dynamics and attitude that the three of us (Bic, Gemma and me) all had towards each other, the ideas we presented and how we communicated was great. Throughout the project, we were in constant communication over Whatsapp - giving us the flexibility to run ideas through with each other. I think that it was a good thing that we were offered the choice of who we wanted to partner with. The fact that we all had our different areas of expertise and interest in design served to really benefit our group. Gemma’s illustration was key in our visual identity, whereas Bic was able to provide our anthology submission with the groundworks it needed by constructing the structure (font matter, body and back matter) of the novel. My contribution was mainly around creating the presentations for the tutors, researching the binding and choosing the most suitable typography for the submission. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the presentation to the tutors for feedback due to ongoing health issues. These health issues unfortunately got in the way of a lot of the work that I wanted to do with this project. In particular, I wanted to get more involved with creating the illustrations for the body copy and margins, As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, I wanted to try and implement a way of integrating rotoscope animations as part of the anthology. I had the idea of using QR codes and wanted to try and utilize them in more of a visually pleasing way than the traditional blocks that you see them in. Ultimately this would’ve been something that I would have spent a lot of time on and would have enjoyed presenting the different concepts for. However, it would have been a challenge to implement this idea throughout the anthology. Although we weren’t the chosen group that went on to design the anthology this year, I am pretty happy with what we were able to present. Perhaps we should’ve been bolder in how we approached the project though, forcing ourselves to get creative with ideas around binding in particular. The project was a good group working experience though, with a real hurdle of communicating and staying motivated collectively during the coronavirus pandemic. Overall though the anthology project wasn’t something that I particularly enjoyed. Although the idea of creating a book cover is exciting and can offer a lot of freedom - over the course of the year I have begun to find myself drawn to certain aspects of design and creative practice that aren’t really related to traditional book design. Although there were elements that I did enjoy, I think my general view on the project was hindered due to my health issues disrupting the progress we had initially made as a group. It should be mentioned that Gemma and Bic were very helpful and understanding throughout the group work as were the tutors.
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7. Book Design : Critical Evaluation