When it came to actually printing and producing the book, I decided to just use tracing paper for the front of the book, acting like a dust jacket. Originally, I wanted to print all of the photographs of the portraits onto tracing paper and lay them out over the type content. However after doing multiple test prints, I realized that this would be very difficult to produce and also made the over all feel of the book feel a bit too hand made and not as slick as I envisioned.
I printed all of the content onto pear grey stock in the digital print resource and I am really over the moon about how the final spreads look in print. The dust jacket works really well and adds an element of excitement to the book.
Once I had printed and folded the spreads, I bound the book using a very simple pamphlet stitch binding method. I went for this method over methods such as perfect or case binding, as I wanted my book to feel like a one off publication, almost like a zine. I wanted it to feel unique and special, as it wouldn't necessarily be printed multiple times. If I were to print the book more than once, I would only do a limited run and would saddle stitch them all for an added sense of originality.
As a whole, I am pleased with my performance throughout this brief. From start to finish, I put a lot of effort into designing and researching for the book. I believe my content is well informed and suits the purpose that I set out to achieve. I am really pleased with how the content looks printed on the stock I chose. I wouldn’t change this aspect, however I could have experimented more with a wider range of stock colour choices. In terms of layout and type, I think I did a good job. If I were to re-design the layouts again, I would have paid more attention to the typesetting of the body copy, although I am pleased with my typesetting skills for this book, as before doing this brief I had never really done any typesetting on this scale and had a limited knowledge of the rules and guides used to achieve high level typesetting.
I am annoyed with a couple of things. Firstly, the tracing paper wrap around dust jacket. When the book was first printed and bound, the dust jack curved slightly, this was most likely due to the heat and rollers within the printer. As time went on, the curl got even worse and the jacket waved around on the outside of the book. This really annoyed me. For submission, I ironed the jacket and this mildly improved the issue. In future, I would look at using thicker tracing paper and would perhaps attempt to screen print on to it to prevent it from curling in the heat of the printer.
The second thing that annoyed me was the various borders around my content. On InDesign, I designed the book with full bleed content, but when it came to printing, I made the mistake of printing the spreads onto A4 stock, when really I should have printed on A3. This was a silly mistake to make and I have learned from my errors and won’t make the same mistake again.
Overall I am really happy with the book, and as people have read it during crits etc they have laughed, smiled and said that I did a great job. People said they found it entertaining, witty and informative which I am really excited about!
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