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DESIGN YOUR PHOTO BOOK

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Week 18 – 19 – 20: Design your Photobook & Complete Essay

Make sure you monitor and track your progress here Personal-Study-Planner-Tracker-2018-19

WE GOT THREE WEEKS LEFT IN CLASS TO COMPLETE PERSONAL STUDY and ONE MOCK EXAM DAY

In the next three week focus on beginning to edit and collect all your images, archival material and texts, including your essay needed to complete your photobook.

You want to aim for a draft layout and hand in draft version of your essay before your Mock Exam day, then use that day to fine tune design and complete essay.

DEADLINE: MOCK EXAM!
Mon 11 Feb Class 13A & 13D
Tue 12 Feb Class 13C

Wed 13 Feb: Hand-out Exam paper

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
  • A sentence
  • A paragraphs

Design: Consider the following

  • How you want your book to look and feel
  • Paper and ink
  • Format, size and orientation
  • Binding and cover
  • Title 
  • Structure and architecture
  • Design and layout
  • Editing and sequencing
  • Images and text

2. Create a BLURB account using your school email address. With Blurb you have different options on how you design your book:

a) Using Lightroom to design your book which is integrated with BLURB. Only for use on school computers, unless you have LR at home on your own laptop.

b) Download Bookwright via Blurb onto your own laptop and work offline at home and you can work indecently of school. Here you have full control of layout/ design features. Once completed, you upload photo book design to Blurb

c) Choose online option if you want to work directly online. Very limited layout/design options (not recommended!)

For those who wish to make their own hand-made photobook using Indesign follow the same steps as below in terms of documenting and annotating your design process.  or if you want to customize your Blurb book see me for more details on how to do it.

3. Using Lightroom make a rough selection of your 40-50 best pictures from all shoots. Make sure you have adjusted and standardised all the pictures in terms of exposure, colour balance/ B&W, contrast/brightness etc.

4. Print them out as smaller images (4 to one A4 page) on the Laserjet, cut them up in guillotine and lay them out on the big white table for editing.

5. Decide on format (landscape, portrait) size and style of your photo-book. Begin to design your photo book, considering carefully, narrative, editing, sequencing, page spreads, juxtaposition, image size, text pages, empty pages, use of archival material etc.

6. At the end of your photo book, add your illustrated essay including title, any captions (if needed), bibliography, illustrations of artists work (incl data) and images of your own responses. Think carefully about font type, size and weighting.

7. Produce screen prints of layout ideas as you progress and add to Blog for further annotation, commenting on page layout/ narrative/ sequencing/ juxtaposition of pictures.

Film/ Podcast; produce screen prints as work progress that show your editing skills/ decisions.

8. Select a set of 5-6 photographs as final outcomes and evaluate – explaining in some detail how well you realised your intentions and reflect on what you learned in your Political Landscape project.

9. Save final outcomes in our shared PRINT folder (no later than 15:00 end of your Mock exam day) in a high-resolution (4000 pixels on the long edge.) Save each images in your name i.e. first name_surname_title_1, and 2, 3 and so on.

10. Make sure all blog posts are finished including, research, analysis, experimentation, annotation and an evaluation of final outcomes.

A2 Personal Investigation, AO1 Develop Ideas, AO2 Explore Ideas, Design

Book Specification

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I want my book to be finished with a hard cover to show a professional finish and ensure quality throughout it.  I believe that an standard sized landscape photo-book will be the most appropriate size as the photographs will be large enough to be seen in detail and there will be enough space to mess around with the formatting of the photographs.   For the paper I will choose the option of premium lustre paper to offer a hint of gloss as well as greater tonal range and contrast. Throughout the book I will be using a mixture of landscape and portrait orientated photographs including a mixture of family environmental portraits and documentary-style photographs of my house as well as archival photographs as this will create a sense of documentary as well as including a personal touch.  I will be using a mixture of design layouts throughout the photo-book such as full-bleeds, off-centre photographs and centered photographs to create a variety of styles and to keep the viewer interested in the narrative.  I am planning on creating a narrative that shows the development of the house from beginning to the current state whilst including personal portrait photographs throughout as well as a couple photographs which do not seem to fit the narrative – the result of this will be a couple of narratives running throughout the book creating a more interesting and experimental book.  I think that I will be using primarily images in the book with minimal text as I would prefer the photographs to show development rather than explaining through added context.  I will be using a mix of black and white and colour photographs – the documentary photographs of the development of my house will be in black and white whereas photographs depicting family memories will be in colour in order to bring some life into the photographs.  I will be taking inspiration for the layout of my book from some of the layouts in “Retracing Our Steps” by Bression and Ayesta.