Design Practice

Graham provide me with some great feeback about the book design and I was so glad I talked to his before I printed otherwise it could have been a very messy and costly affair. there were a number of things I needed to sort out, well 'refine', the basis of the document though was there with the information and the layout choices.

1. The page layouts which I had initialy chosen was wrong for some of the pages.

It seems like the bee all and end all of everything but Graham assured me with such a small document it could be changed with ease. because the book had such a long cover which on the reverse ran into the pages behind (see images) I created a a4 landscape document which when the internal pages were in an A5 portrait format this posed problem especially with alignments.

2. The margins were 'tiny'.

The final chosen grid was a five column which was the same equal width of that of the gutters, 4.233. Although this gave a harmonious effect the way the page was laid out the margins that were set out when printed were in fact half that size because I had laid out the page as of it was an A4 document. This presented great problems when it came to text near the margin on the inside of the book because they were so close to the crease it made your eyes hurt. I ended up doubling the margin and doibling it again at the books' crease.

3. The ascender height isn't always the top height.

Not maybe an essential layout consideration but where I had decided to align some text with an image I had aligned it with the ascender, it looked nice but what Graham spoke about was how if the word is written in lower case text the optimum line of height changes in particular with those that have a mayority of letterforms with x heights, so I changed it to align with this instead in particular areas.

4. Point size could be a problem.

I have thought about this, working myself I normally write incredibly small and short pieces of small text especially where I have linked references I thought was an incredibly good idea. But graham brought up the fact that if the tutors cannot read it it could affect what they see and might affect my grade. These were viewed on a laser printed black and white sample and having used the ink-jet printers in the digital print rooms I have found them to be far more accurate and should have a better resolution and therefore be easier to read.

When printing today after speaking to Graham I had found a couple of proof-related issues. First of all because I have new software and the college computer were working on an earlier version I had to convert the file properly without losing clarity of the document. This was relatively simple until I found out that some of the images that I had used had missing links, and oh my did that take a long time to produce and even when that went right when I corrected them automatically, other images were chosen in their place. Frustrating times, yet the outcome of the book looks really nice. Being only three duplex pages I decided to print all of them for submission, simply because I could and it gives a better insight into the structure.