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My Final Booklet

PDF versions:

Exported Pages with Crop Marks [10582kb]
Exported Pages without Crop Marks [10580kb]
Exported Spreads with Crop Marks [10566kb]
Exported Spreads without Crop Marks [10565kb]

Screenshots (Exported Spreads without Crop Marks):final_001final_page2final_page3final_page4

 

My final booklet printed by Kinkos (nearest to foreground) and some of my trial prints/booklets to test for colors (located in background):

final

 

Intent/Meaning of Booklet

Through this booklet, I intent to encourage students to study abroad in London. This is achieved by showing a student that while studying in London, he/she can easily find great food and entertainment. I also included many interesting pictures that can bring out the excitement in London.

 

Grids and design elements

For my booklet, I used a modular grid in the spreads to create a flexible, yet consistent alignment and placement for the headings, main body text and images. For each spread, I chose one photo (the photo on the left spread nearest to the heading) where I would only highlight one coherent color/hue and greyscale the other parts of it (spread theme color/hue) to make the spread look interesting. The pictures and colors were chosen to represent London such that it can create a sense of Isomorphic Correspondence. I wanted people who have been to London before (or those who are planning to go to London) to recognize the colors and relate to the London icons/photos easily.

For the 2nd spread on “Learn”, I also made use of the fact that the spread will be printed across the same sheet/page (hence reducing alignment problems), so I extended the Portico, University College London photo across the middle of the page. As for spreads 1 and 3 (“Play” and “Eat” respectively), I also shifted the placement of the images on the right spread to make them different as part of the design of the booklet, to make it less repetitive.

The caption for each image is aligned to the bottom right corner of the image, and also a white transparency overlay is placed on the image to ensure that the text is visible and easily read. The caption (font weight and size) is made such that it does not capture too much attention away from the photos.

 

Typographic Variables

I used a couple of decorative London-related fonts to convey the style of my book, because I wanted to bring out the fun and happy side of studying, while in London. Apart from in-class critique, I also did a few users testing from my friends (those who have been to London especially) to obtain feedback about the choice of font. I generally received very positive feedback about the choice and size of typography. Initially, I planned to use the font size from the typography samples done earlier, but they appear to be too large during the design process, and so I changed them accordingly to suit the overall design of the booklet.

I also made use of size, color, uppercase, orientation and white space to communicate the main heading with the reader, and to also capture the reader’s attention to the main headings on each spread. I wanted to draw their eyes to the heading and give focus to the headings as they look at the spreads.

Using font weight, I wanted to draw the reader’s attention to certain keywords in the main body text of each spread to quickly provide an idea on what my content is about describing London. As for the main body, I used a fairly easy to read font and size, as well as leading to help make the paragraph easier to read.

I also used a font weight with a white opaque overlay to help communicate the image to the reader using captions at the bottom right corner of each image. I experimented with different font size and weights of the captions using paragraph styles to ensure that it does not draw too much attention from the images themselves.

Finally, I also played around with typography to create a London “logo” such that it resembles a London bus, to make the front cover more interesting, unique and dynamic.

 

The design process/decisions and feedback from in-class critique

I experimented with and printed a couple of different compositions prior to the in-class critique session, and I chose my favorite one for the in-class critique. These are photos of the comments for the draft that I chose and passed around.IMG_0575IMG_0576IMG_0577IMG_0578IMG_0579

These are some other booklets I printed for trial purposes:IMG_0580IMG_0581

Below are some comments from the critique session, and also a discussion of my final decisions and the changes I made for the final booklet:

  • Logo: Most people who recognized it liked my logo and said it was very cute, but there were some who couldn’t tell that it was a London Bus. Hence, I made it look more like a London bus by adding a simple bus roof to the logo.
  • Photos exposure: Some commented that some photos were too dark (particularly the cover photo and the UCL Portico photo), while some were too overexposed. I followed up by adjusting them using Photoshop and also printed many samples to choose a good exposure.
  • Cover: The cover photo was too grey-ish which made London look gloomy. I worked on that by increasing the brightness and curves using Photoshop.
  • Headings: The main headings were too large. I made it smaller and also created a margin between the image and the heading to give them more white space.
  • Captions: I agree with the comments that the bold captions took away a lot of attention from the photos. Hence, I removed the bold font weight.
  • Grammer issues: There were some grammatical and spelling errors in some of the paragraphs which I fixed.
  • Photos shine: There are some shine in some of the photos, which I used Photoshop’s clone stamp tool to remove.
  • White transparency overlay: Someone mentioned that the white transparency was not sufficient. However, I thought it was sufficient enough so I decided not to change it.
  • Emphasize important points in main body: I also used font-weight (bold) to highlight an important bit of the text so the reader can quickly find the key words of the meaning that I want to bring across. For example, for the “Play” spread, I emphasized “shopping haven”. For “Learn”, I highlighted “work and play hard” and for “Eat”, I chose “food paradise”.
  • White space: I also agree with some comments which mentioned that there might be too many pictures on the right spread, and thus insufficient white space, and that can cause the reader to lose focus. Thus, I removed 1 picture from each of the spread for “Play” and “Eat”. Then, I experimented with the grids to make the layout of the remaining images interesting and also to give them sufficient attention using white space.
  • Design consistency: Initially, I planned to make the design such that only 1 photo on each spread is used to to clearly highlight the color scheme of each spread (i.e. Red for the London telephone booth in “Play”, Blue for the typical classroom photo in “Learn”, and Orange for the Chinese Food Stall photo in “Eat”). However, only it wasn’t apparent enough, so I made it more obvious.

Things that worked (which I kept)

  • Clean layout using modular grids
  • Nice choice of photos
  • Good use of color scheme on different pages, and colors to represent London
  • The London logo (cute!)