Publishing Design - Task 1

29 August 2023 - 13 October 2023 / Week 1 - Week 7
Sim Jia Min 0349784
Publishing Design / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media / Taylor's University
Task 1: Exercises

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LECTURES

Week 1: Formats
The lecture is about various formats, highlighting the significance of books as a medium for knowledge sharing, history, and records. The historical development of writing systems in different civilizations was also explored.

Mesopotamian Civilization (Iran-Iraq):
- Pictographic writing on clay tablets.

Ancient Egyptian Civilization (Egypt):
- Hieroglyphics on papyrus paper and tomb walls.

Indus Valley Civilization (India-Pakistan-Afghanistan): 

- Cuneiform writing on clay tablets.

Han Chinese Civilization (China): 

- Early Chinese characters on bamboo strips and paper scrolls.

European Civilization (Turkey & beyond): 

- Invention of parchment from animal hide.

Week 2: History of Prints
The lecture delved into the historical development of printing techniques and the early use of printed materials.

2nd - 8th Century AD:
- Carving of Confucian classics in stone in China (AD 175).
- Early printing on paper in Korea and Japan.

The First Printed Book (AD 868):
- World's first printed illustration of enthroned Buddha.

Movable type (11th century)
- Introduction of movable type, precursor to modern printing.

Type Foundry in Korea (c.1380):
- Development of bronze movable type.

Saints & Playing Cards (AD c.1400):
- Introduction of woodblock printing in Europe.

Gutenberg & Western Printing (AD 1439-1457):
- Gutenberg's invention of the printing press and metal type.

Week 3: Typography Redux
An exploration of typography and the importance of legibility in book design.

Characters in a Typeface:
- Small Caps, Numerals, Fractions, Ligatures, Punctuations, Mathematical Signs, Symbols, Non-Aligning Figures.

Legibility:
- underline should be lowered (not touching characters)
- small capitals are good for subheads or first line of paragraph
- all caps: not suitable for long sentence
- outline and shadow crucial for readability
- never distort the font
- Factors for legibility, including type size, line length, and line spacing (50-65).

Alignment:
- Flush left ragged right: ready can easily locate the new line
- flush right, ragged left: for a small amount of text
- centred: formal, used minimally, not suitable for a big amount of texts
- justified left, centre, right: readable if spacing consistent

Special formatting:
- Usage of hyphens, dashes, drop caps, and sidebars.

Week 4: The Grid
The concept of grids in design and their significance in creating an organized and clear layout.
Raster Systeme:
- Grids as an ordering system
- Grids divides 2D plane into smaller fieds, 3D space into compartments
- sense of intelligibility and clarity, orderliness


Week 5: Elements
This lecture is about the major elements in publications and the importance of variation while maintaining consistency.

Elements in Publications:
- Type, Color, Visual

Variation:
- Importance of creating variation while keeping certain elements consistent within a modular grid system
- have variation but maintain consistency, it can be done through textual, colour and visuals
- not every pages has to be different, reuse the formulas of the design

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INSTRUCTIONS (MIB)

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Exercise 1: Text Formatting

This is a text formatting for the book design, the content is from one of my favourite novels, "Convenience Store Woman" by Sayaka Murata, the story basically revolves around a woman who dedicatedly works in a convenience store and always struggles to fit into social norms ever since she was a kid.

Figure 1.1: Text formatting

Exercise 2: Mock-up making

We are instructed to have 3 options of book size that is smaller than A4 but bigger than A5, my decision for book size is B5 (17.6cm x 25cm).

Figure 2.1: Size exploration with multiple options (Week 2, 8/9/23)

Figure 2.2: Chosen size - 17.6 x 25 (Week 2, 8/9/23) 

Figure 2.3: Final book mock-up 17.6 x 25 (Week 2, 8/9/23)

Figure 2.4: Final book mock-up 17.6 x 25 (Week 2, 8/9/23)

Exercise 3: Signature folding systems & zine printing

Doing folding on A3 paper and making it into a small booklet:

Figure 3.1: Folding in half 4 times (Week 3, 15/9/23)

Figure 3.2: Binding (Week 3, 15/9/23)

Figure 3.3: Final folding (Week 3, 15/9/23)

We then used InDesign to form layouts by applying images and texts with guidelines, then printed them out in A3 size and using the folding system to fold them into a small zine.

Figure 3.4: Layout arrangement (Week 3, 15/9/23) 

Figure 3.5: Printed zine (Week 3, 15/9/23) 

Figure 3.6: Final zine (Week 3, 15/9/23) 

Figure 3.7: Final zine (Week 3, 15/9/23) 

Exercise 4: Classical grid system

Learning to build the basic of page construction, Van De Graaf on InDesign.

Figure 4.1: Van De Graaf (Week 3, 15/9/23)

Figure 4.2: Van De Graaf (Week 3, 15/9/23)

Exercise 5: Determining grid

For this exercise, we decide the margin that will be applied to our book layout, my final decision is option 1.

Figure 5.1: Option 1 (Chosen option) (Week 4, 22/9/23)

Figure 5.2: Option 2 (Week 4, 22/9/23) 

Figure 5.3: Option 3 (Week 4, 22/9/23)

Figure 5.4: Printed option 1 (Week 4, 22/9/23)

Exercise 6: Type specimen sheet
For this exercise, we have to decide the types and typesetting for our book design. I decided to stick with option 2 on the right side because it has a contrast of sans serif and serif between the title and the other texts, which can emphasise the title more.

Figure 6.1: Left - Option 1, Right - Option 2 (Week 4, 23/9/23)

The chosen type specimen for book layout design:

Title: Helvetica Bold, size 30pt

Pullquote: Garamond Bold, size 11pt, leading 13pt

Subtext: Garamond Italic, size 8pt, leading 10pt

Body: Garamond Regular, size 9pt, leading 12pt, line length 51

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FEEDBACK

Week 2:

- text formatting is fine

- The visualisation of dialogue can be tricky to do but need to find some ways to make it interesting

Week 4:

- layout references: the overlay body text layout is interesting, but proceed with the one that has a line, the other one might not work the best in readability.

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REFLECTION

Experiences: 

This is the first time I have ever done this much printing on campus (finally spending the money on my POD acc), but it is nice to have these exercises that provided a hands-on experience by printing, instead of looking through the design digitallly, as it is important to look at the physical stuff to be thoughtful for the font sizes, ensuring the readability, and also learning how the pages arrangement (the folding system exercise) works for printing a book.

Observation:

I definitely need to improve my skill in using cutter, and I definitely do see that I am not good at handling physical stuff, like the bookbinding with stapler, I actually bind it tilted a few times, kinda embarrassed about how bad I am in doing that is basically like art and craft.

Findings:

I have learned that each design choice is significant in the design of a book, whether it's the book size, margin, visual placement or typography.

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FURTHER READING

Book: The Vignelli Canon by Vignelli, M. 

It is quite an insightful piece on design philosophy. The book mentioned key elements like semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic, highlighting the importance of understanding a subject's meaning, maintaining syntactical consistency, and valuing intellectual elegance and timelessness in the design process. In a world where design often tends to be superficial and short-lived, these principles remind designers to prioritise depth and long-lasting quality.