The main purpose of this project was to create a book and fill it with information that we gather. This book will be a reference for us on the many methods and options of printing and the different routes we can explore when it comes to picking and personalizing a substrate.
From the onset of this project, I wanted to incorporate Helvetica. It has been used for print so much that I wanted to have some fun with it too. I quickly decided to use a mostly black and white palette, and to only use color for the substrate examples, diagrams, etc.. I also wanted to include a nice sans serif typeface, and I settled on Baskerville because it has a nice variation in line thickness and long but thin serifs. After that, I just started playing with paragraph and headline placement until I settled on a layout. I maintain a stylistic trend throughout with page numbers, headlines, and so on where I decrease the leading to the point that the characters touch or overlap. I wanted to do this to break the tedium of Helvetica, and because I love exploring the relationships of individual characters.
After I built the document in InDesign, I tried exporting it to print, but I could not get it to print in the correct order. After researching and getting nowhere, I decided to just reorder the pages of my document so it output pages in the right order. After that, I gathered the pages into 4 page groups and stapled them at the center fold. After that, I taped all of the page sets together to hold them in place, and then hot glued them to a strip of canvas to give the glue something semi-solid to bind to. After that, I took a piece of cardboard and measured out the total surface area of the outside of my book. From this, I extended the borders by a quarter of an inch, and that gave me the dimensions I needed to work with to complete my cover and spine design. I printed my outside cover on tabloid, and cut it down to fit the outside cover cardboard. I used spray adhesive to stick the cover to the cardboard, and then hot glued the spine of the book to the center of the cover. Finally, I used spray adhesive to glue printer paper to the inside and back inside covers, to cover up the exposed cardboard. For my samples, I just used a paper cuter to cut 1 ½ inch squares, which I glued in place.
This is the first time I have taken a complete publication from conceptualization to completion. I ran into some problems, such as the printer refusing to print my pages out in order, as well as problems with assembling the product itself. The main thing I learned during this project is the amount of different skills it takes to go from 0-100% on a print project.
