OUGD505 - Studio Brief 2: An Exhibition (5)

With all the content written and finished, the only thing I need to do is to create the introductory pages to the sections, and a introductory spread for the whole book.

Before doing this, I looked at an exhibition book I previously bought after visiting the Lichtenstein Exhibition at the Tate last year. I thought it would be good to see how the introductory pages were done in this at the beginning of the whole book, and what other sections were included in case there was something fundamental that I missed out.

This exhibition book was 365 pages long and had about 10 different introductory pages before it even got to the contents page. I found that this was a bit too much and would be completely pointless in my book. I did however like the idea of a bit of a foreword before the content explaining the reason for the exhibition.

Foreword:

In the Lichtenstein book, there was also a big double page spread introductory page with just the exhibition name on, which I thought was a good idea to include in mine, especially as the player introductory pages have all been double page spreads too.

Going with the same idea as the player introductory pages, I created this first page.

I decided on the red because it works the best over both the blue and the greyscale. I had initially wanted it to be in white, however this was very hard to read over the greyscale so was unfeasible. I tried it in black too, but this was very dark over the already dark blue, so again isn't feasible. This left me with either red or blue, and obviously the blue wouldn't work. While this seems a bit hard to read on screen, I do think it will work printed.

I then moved onto creating the introductory pages for the other sections. Following the lead of the player introductory pages, I wrote the titles in the custom typeface I created.

When it came to the layout of these pages, I wanted to keep it similar to the player pages, however as there is a considerably less amount of information to include, I would need to accommodate this and make it work well. Also, I wanted to make it obvious that these sections were different to the player pages, so wanted to show that in the front spreads.

As the images in these sections are red, I decided on having this as the overlay colour on the front spreads. In the player section this is the same with the images there - they are blue, so the front page overlay is blue.

I put the red overlay over a greyscale image first, but found that it didn't work as well as the blue overlay did. I then tried laying it over a blue image and really liked the way the image worked, especially when is added over the top.

I decided that I liked this simple layout as it shows what it needs to and isn't overly complicated. The colours work really well together and I think it's quite a balanced spread so am pleased with how it turned out.

With this success, I applied the same to the other three introductory pages, finding images which were representative of the sections.

At this point I have pretty much completely finished the book, which I am pleased about. I've now got a couple of days before the last possible day to send it off to print, so it gives me time to refine a few things and think about how it is going to be printed.

I spent some time going through and checking the formatting of text and making sure it all worked well, before thinking about how the book will be bound and how to make it look as professional as possible.

I uploaded the book onto the website I was using for print - Peecho - so I could see all the settings which were possible with the size and amount of pages.

I had three options:

• 'Magazine' - perfect bound with a matte cover.
• 'Soft cover' - perfect bound with a gloss cover.
• 'Hard cover' - case bound with a hardback cover.

While I liked the idea of a hardback cover, I wasn't particularly confident that this would work well with the front cover design that I had done. I also wanted it to match the printing done for the Brand Guidelines book. When uploading this, as there aren't over 100 pages, it doesn't give the option of Hardback binding.

I decided that the soft cover binding was the most appropriate as I think the gloss cover will give a professional finish to the book. I already know that the prints come out well and is bound very well, so the quality is not something I am worried about at all.

Once happy with the two books, I uploaded them to the site and sent them off to print, both of them with the soft cover binding option.

The Brand guidelines will be 180x240mm, & the exhibition book will be at 180x260mm.

At this point I am happy with my progress in this brief. While I had a couple of weeks where I focussed on other briefs, getting back into this and getting it all done efficiently has been great and I found it to be enjoyable. Now all I have to do is wait for these to come through in the post, while I move onto filling in the gaps of this brief, and exploring other areas for the exhibition.