The purpose of this project is to create a travel book on the region the group has chosen, my group chose Germany. We were responsible for the layout but not the content is written. I was the art director of the group and I was in charge of the cover, content page, and made sure everyone was following the layout and meeting deadlines.
Application(s) used: Procreate on iPad, Adobe Indesign
Team members:
- Belicia Jiao
- Kelsi Nash
- Eric Nazario
- Nathan Pittenger
- Jacson Saturno
- Winston Warner
- Thomas Warren
Volunteering to be the art director:
Each group needs an Art Director, and they are basically the group leader. I volunteered to be the art director for the group because I am a pretty organized person myself and I like to be on top of things, so I tried to make my group do that as well.
So I first set up the production schedule for our book, the first thing we did was to have a group meeting and we all sketched out different ideas and possible layouts we could use. It was really hard to narrow it down to a few because there were about 8 people in our group, and I had to find a happy medium where everyone would be happy. After a four-hour meeting, I reviewed the sketches then set up the Indesign document. I made sure to create paragraph styles for each category like titles, subtitles, captions, etc.
Sketches:
Making the layout:
Our vision was to have our book as a coffee table book, we wanted it to be simple and easy to read. We focused on having a good balance between words and photos, we wanted to make sure that one doesn’t overpower the other. We also focused on having more white space because if there is none it will be too crowded, and I feel like white space adds to the design as well.
After I sent out the layout, it was time for all my group members to plug in content and photos we found for the book. Each person is responsible for one region of Germany.
Everything in between:
Another thing we had to decide was the “in-between pages”, since there are different regions, we decided to have two of them, one will be of an illustrated map with he location highlighted, and the other acting as an intro page of the upcoming region.
Challenges:
I have set a schedule for our group but some people have failed to meet the deadlines, which is a little frustrating on my part because I want things to be done on time.
One thing that was hard is that my group was not very responsive, so when bringing up suggestions and changes, but I guess if they don’t have any additional comments it means they have to go with how I set it up. And I guess people don’t read or pay attention to my emails and texts because I keep getting questions about directions I have given out.
I was actually not that familiar with Indesign, so setting up paragraph styles took a while to figure out, but I figured it out. It was hard to estimate how long the titles were going to be for the stories, so I had to play around with that a bit. I kept messing up and missing things and I had to send a thousand emails to my group mates they probably think I am crazy. But I have to keep in mind that we are all learning and I am taking this class for the first time just like everyone else.
I had a schedule set up for the group and everything on the computer should be done by thanksgiving break, but you know not everything goes according to plan, it is half way through break and I have not received all the files. This is the most frustrating on my part because I feel like everyone would have a great break if everyone turned in their things on time, and because some people did not, I have to try to organize everything over break which I am not a fan of.
Cover:
After everything in the content was taken care of, it was time for me to come up with the cover page. Here are some ideas I played around with:
Well obviously as you can see I did no use any of those three from above, it does not really fit with the ~vibe~ of the book. So I decided to stray away from illustrations, and just randomly did some abstract art. Honestly I think it turned out great and it fits better with the rest of the book.
Another fun touch we decided to add is a quote, but instead of putting it all in one place, we place of the quote in the beginning and the other half at the end.
Assembling:
Fast forward to Monday after break, we printed random pages in class and now we are trying to finish up little bits and pieces, everyone is stressed and tired butt we are all trying hard. We had a few hiccups on the printing process, but we figured it out.
Printing it really puts everything in perspective and it is easier to catch the mistakes, me and a few other people showed up at 730 am Tuesday and had the process started. We made sure all the settings were correct then printed out about 400 pages of content because everyone in the group had to have a copy plus 2 extra ones for the professor to grade. Once we got the flow of it down the process went fine. We printed and trimmed the covers and the pages, I cut out glue sticks and all the group needs to do is to bind it now. Binding was a little tricky but we figured it out. This is overall a stressful event, but I learned a lot about what goes behind a travel book and managing, seeing my first book come together was such a moment, it felt like I had my baby in my hands. Lol
Final thoughts:
This project was definitely stressful, I have never managed so many people in my life. But being organized and staying on top of things really helped. Communication is definitely key, this is an incredible learning experience for me and I got a lot more comfortable with adobe Indesign.
Here you can scroll through the book digitally:
