Your final assignment asks you to draw on all the skills, insight and experience you have gained so far, by designing and producing a book of your choice. Use the following options to as a starting point or alternatively identify your own project. ● Influential book designers Identify one or more book designers to present through your book. Find ways to develop your own creative responses to their ideas and visual approaches. Delve into their work, find suitable quotations, i

Begin by reflecting upon the sorts of projects, exercises and assignments you have enjoyed most: ● Do you enjoy the creative freedom of working with your own text and images from scratch, or do you prefer working with text and images that are provided to you? ● Do you prefer working in a ‘hands-on’ way, physically manipulating paper and materials, or do you prefer working digitally, laying out the pages and page elements on-screen? Which of the subjects covered in this unit h

In this exercise you can use any images created elsewhere in the course, to print onto the paper samples you collected earlier. Active experimentation You are encouraged to be experimental in these exercises; it doesn’t matter if you make a mess or get things wrong in the images you make. It is important to reinforce this message at this point in the creative process, as often people tighten up when they think they are embarking on the final piece, and lose some of the fluidi

Adrian Pipes’ On Press chapter, from his 2009 Production for Graphic Designers manual, provides a thorough overview of the print process, both historically and practically. Exploring paper, the raw materials that make it, recycled, handmade and manufactured paper, and other stocks; various qualities of inks; various printing processes, including emerging technologies; print finishing and binding; and interviews with a number of book designers. Chapter Six - On Press (p.165 –

However you plan to work in the production of your book, spend some time now planning your workflow, using the notes above as a guide. Think about how much flexibility you can allow yourself – don’t put yourself under too much pressure. At the same time, be aware of time constraints that may be outside your control. If you’re using a local printer, for example, make contact as soon as possible. Your printer may have a limited timeframe for doing your job and you’ll need to fa

The list below is showing a range of art book fairs, both independent publishers and independent designers and artists. Research the book fairs online and explore the wide range of books by independent publishers, to gain a better understanding of the variety of books and publishing possibilities. You might want to visit one of the fairs in the future and explore the books. Book Fairs in South Africa are not on the same scale as in the UK. However, there are a few that happen

Working with the outlined publishing models, identify the various roles you (and potentially others) will be undertaking for assignment five. For example, you’re likely to be writing your own content, designing your book, editing and reviewing it. You may also be involved in the production, printing and distribution process. Consider each aspect of the book assignment and briefly list what roles you think you’ll be doing, and what these roles entail. Also make notes of the ro

Using a found book, significantly alter the appearance of the pages to create a new volume that is personal to you. This can be any kind of book that is of interest to you. For example, a fiction book, a non-fiction book, a picture book or a photo book. Approach the found book in a very physical way, manipulating the pages and paper inventively. If you need to, stitch or glue a number of pages together to reduce the ground you need to cover. Decide what to remove from the boo

Reflect, evaluate and rework Having printed your images from the previous exercise, take the opportunity to view all of the pages, reflect on them and evaluate before moving on to the next step of collating and binding the pages together. Which pages are successful? Which pages have not turned out as well as you had hoped? Are there any visual surprises, or happy accidents? Given the experimental and open-ended nature of this exercise, the answers may be quite subjective, but

In this exercise you’re going to create images which you’ll then print onto the papers you collected in the first exercise. You have been working with the poem Tango With Cows in the exercise ‘Concrete Poetry’, to create an experimental text. Using your interpretation of the poem as a starting point, develop a set of images that you can sequence into a narrative. You can choose to create these images yourself or use existing images. Idea generation Create a series of images w

Critical writing task Identify an example of concrete poetry and write a short critique of the content, design and the relationship between the content and form. How has the use of typography, layout, and space been employed to help generate meaning? Print out a copy of the poem and add notes directly onto the page. Write a brief summary of your thoughts, feelings and reflections on how concrete poetry creates new meanings. As a starting point you may want to look at the foll

To begin: Collect a wide variety of paper samples and other paper ephemera across a range of weights, textures and surface finishes. This builds on your previous paper sample exercise from Part Two. Aim to collect a wide range of unprinted papers, such as blotting paper, tracing paper, lined paper, graph paper, rice paper and handmade papers. Look out for papers with special print finishes – metallic, embossed, shiny and matt. Aim to collect paper that is light as a feather a

Find two artists’ books that you feel demonstrate an interesting relationship between their form and content through the materials that the artist has chosen to use. Reflect on these books in your learning log. If you have physical access to libraries such as The British Library, Tate Library Special Collection, or Leeds University Library, visit them and have a look at examples of artists’ books in their special collections. Libraries have online resources as well with acces

The brief: Create two books explaining and exploring the typographic and layout principles you have researched in this section. Book 1: My Little Book of…Good Typography Using the reference material that you’ve gathered throughout the exercises and research tasks in Part Three, design a book which explores traditional ‘good practice’ in typography. What is readability and, as a designer, how can you aid it? Visually explain the typographic principles that we’ve touched on in

As a student on this course you have access to Bridgeman and Oxford Art Online image libraries, which are a wonderful resource. If you haven’t already done so, spend some time finding your way around the Bridgeman Art Library and Oxford Art Online. You can access these through your OCA/UCA library access via the OCA student website. Searching I logged onto the Bridgeman Art Library via Open University library website and found lots of images. I searched for patterns, pop art

Below is an extract from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Using a single typeface of your choice, lay out the text in as inventive a way as possible. Experiment with the letters and words, using the typographic principles you researched in earlier exercises to significantly alter the arrangement of the text, its rhythm and readability. Think about design group Tomato’s definition of typography – ‘Sound as form’ – and how this concept might apply to your own work. U

In Exercise 3, you have to choose a typeface for the text, but how do you choose a typeface? In Notes on Book Design, Derek Birdsall describes clearly how you can choose a typeface that is appropriate for your text. Read the section ‘ on choosing a typeface ’ in the book, Notes on Book Design, and use this as an approach in Exercise 3. Notes from choosing a Typeface. While reading through Derek Birdsall's section "On choosing a typeface", I made these notes. The typeface you

This two part exercise aims to understand the relationship between typography, the grid, and the page in more depth by analysing existing layouts and creatively developing alternative ones. Both of these activities will feed into assignment three. Understanding layouts Research into book layouts that you find interesting. These could be art or design books, or others that have more complex layouts that balance images, typography and other content across multiple columns. Trac

The Golden Section, or Golden Mean, has been applied by artists and designers over the centuries to create harmonious formats for their work. In his extensive research, Tschichold discovered that many book designs were based on the Golden Section. Based on a mathematical formula, and directly linked to the Fibonacci series, the Golden Section provides a method of creating and dividing space that is a useful working framework for the book designer. Look into the golden section

Find as many examples of type as you can from a range of sources, including newspapers, magazines, flyers, leaflets, online, and printed ephemera. Broadly classify them into serif and sans-serif groups. Explore your computer to see whether you have any of the typefaces mentioned on the previous page. Find other examples on your computer that relate to these classifications. Print these off and begin to create a collection of type samples. Identify Choose five different typefa