Book Specification

1. Write a book specification and describe in detail what your book will be about in terms of narrative, concept and design.  Produce a mood-board of design ideas and consider the following:

Narrative: What is your story?
Describe in:

  • 3 words: family, memories, loss
  • A sentence: My book is about my grandpa and the memories I have with him surrounding the natural landscapes we spent time in.
  • A paragraphs: My book will focus the relationship between me and my grandfather and the memories I have of my time with him. I will structure the book with three key sections divided with poems he wrote which all link to natural environments we spent time in. I hope the book will display the connection we had as a family and even people who did not know my grandpa can relate it to special memories with their own families.

Design: 

  • How you want your book to look and feel: I want my book to have a personal feel, not just to me but to anyone looking at it, I will achieve this by using settle materials, nothing extravagant or over the top. It should feel like an old book which has been used and read with textured thick pages.
  • Paper and ink: I want to use a matte finish paper so that my photos don’t reflect too much light and look like a magazine image. This should help to give it a personal and simple look.  
  • Format, size and orientation: I want the book to be small and discrete, something that can easily be carried around and stored on a book shelf with family albums of on a coffee table to be looked through. possibly in a portrait format however i may change this once I start the layout
  • Binding and cover: my cover will display a landscape image that links to the ideas running through the book, potentially a place where I made fond memories with my grandpa such as the beach. I want it to wrap around the cover similarly to how the landscape painting wraps around my grandpas Anthology. 
  • Title: The title of my book will be ‘little changes’ , this is the name of one of the poems my grandpa wrote which will feature in the book as a stimulus for my photos.
  • Structure and architecture: there are going to be 3 main sections in the book split with the use of each poem, firstly tunnelling which focuses on his childhood and memories of the beaches which I also visited with him. the next poem will be Steffi’s castle relating back to when I was younger playing with my grandpa in their house. the final poem will be
  • Design and layout: I will have a large variety of image types to include such as portraits of family member, landscapes of memorable places, archival images and scans of documents. I will arrange these image types in a complimentary oder depending on shapes and colours that run through them. i also want the images to relate for example a picture taken recently placed next to a similar archival image to show the jumping time.
  • Editing and sequencing: I want to edit the photos naturally but also with a slight vintage feel to look as though they are looking back, linking the the idea of memories.
  • Images and text: I will type the poems out as in a type written font because this is how my grandpa would have originally worked. This style will run through the book with all the text. I am going to try an use as many original images as possible however the archival element will play a big part of the story acting as the anchor for the memories, my own photos will illustrate the memories which were not recorded by photographs at the time.

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