The wrapping paper book. I had some wrapping paper left over and so decided to use it for a friends birthday present to see how it looks and I really like it! The repetition created by the borders and the pops of colour from the symbols really work to create an aesthetically pleasing pattern, and a really nice wrapping paper. One of my concerns had been that the wrapping paper, women’s paper was a little on the thin side, but it works well and you can not see any of the present underneath!

Images of the book documenting my investigation and patterns.

Process Books

I chose the format to be representative of the magazine size and used newsprint to resembled the newspapers. 

I wanted to try and stay away from that ‘process book look’ that can come with lots of pictures and annotations. I tried to make the spreads as interesting and varied as possible. I used the colour and themes from each of the projects as a way to resemble the project and differentiate between them. For example by using different colours for the strings and headings that reflected the content of the projects.

For my process book on pattern I decided to put some of my trials as full bleed patterns as the nature of patterns lend themselves to be displayed in this way, and so I thought I should exploit this. By varying the size of the pages in between I was able to still include the information relevant to each pattern/trial, yet still show the varied outcomes of the patterns/trials.

Inevitably there were a few spreads that had that ‘process book look’ but this couldn’t be helped because at the end of the day it is a process book.

The content really is a condensed version of this blog, and without having been as thorough and consistent with this blog through out the process, when I came to create the process books I do not believe I would have remembered all that I had logged here. 

I created a small booklet outlining the concept for the V&A brief so that all the information was together rather than being on separate sheets.

I created a long thin format to resemble and hold the length of the designs. I used the same typeface as I did for the hoarding, which was specified by  D&AD.

Hopefully by having all of the information in one booklet it is easier for the reader to see and understand all aspects of the concept and design.

Production

I had lots of hiccups with the printing side of the production. Me and printing do not get on! I had smudges, printing upside down, the printer feeding two bits of paper at one time and so becoming out of sinc when printing double sided. Pretty sure everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. But I got there in the end.

The binding went better than the printing, I am happy with the end result as the lines are straight and even though there are little gaps between signatures I know that I did my best and couldn’t have pulled any tighter on the thread to get it any closer. 

I did have one major hiccup though, somehow through turning the book over and holding pages during the binding the corner of the first signature of the first page of the big book got bent. I was devastated as it was clearly noticeable as the smaller book does’t cover it. It was bent quite a lot and sticking up. I had two options either put something heavy on it or iron it. Getting enough weight on it to actually make a difference and also trying to balance books on the two size format was going to be tricky. So I decided to iron it. I pracrised with some scraps first to make sue the gloss wasn’t going to react with the heat. I was very gentle and very quick and I managed to iron out the bend. I am disappointed as you can see it is a little muffled and does not lay perfect like the bottom left corner, but I have done all I can to rectify it so there is nothing more I can do.

While thinking about my final outcomes as a whole piece, I began to think about exactly what I was demonstrating and communicating. I had set out to investigate if pattern could be used as a communicative tool. So far the book that I had created documented all of the investigation into the stereotypes of women and how it applied to the pattern. So the book in a nut shell described and demonstrated the information side of the pattern. The animation pushed the boundaries of what pattern could be and added another level of information by allowing the viewer to see the patterns dissected. This communicated and demonstrated ideas around pattern and information together.

I then had the idea to show the patterns as purely patterns, to demonstrate that the patterns I had created were decorative in their nature and appealing as a patterns should be. I thought about creating a poster or wallpaper using all of the patterns from the investigation, however this would have just been a purely visual representation with no real life application. So I decided to make wrapping paper from the patterns as wrapping paper is used to wrap presents and is chosen because of it’s decorative design. Therefore the wrapping paper has a more concrete use and shows the pattern working in an actual scenario. 

I decided, as with the animation, to create wrapping papers based on purely the women’s and men’s magazines. I did this because again I just wanted to create a sample to show what could be created rather than using the entire data, as it would have been repetitive and time consuming to make. By merging all of the women’s and all of the men’s together it enabled the reader to see the two categories as a whole while also making the pattern more exciting.

I differentiated between the two categories through the use of stock that I chose for the wrapping paper. I chose a delicate wrapping paper in a light cream for the women’s magazine patterns to create ideas around the feminine, and a darker newsprint for the men’s, something a little rougher to represent the masculine. I think having the two stocks was successful as it adds variation and allows for differentiation.

Another way I created variation was to dissect the patterns, once again resembling the animation. However I did not dissect it 

as far as the individual symbols because then the patterns became dominant in white space and less exciting. So I just stripped it back to the orange and the green layers.

This created three variations for each category. I then began to think about how I could display the wrapping papers and decided to compile them into a book 

so that they were kept together. By using a perforation the reader can rip out the desired wrapping paper while still leaving the rest as a set to be read.

For the design of the wrapping paper I trialled different scales, however found it worked best, as with the animation, to have a small scale as the repetition created in the large quantities had much more impact than when on a bigger scale. 

I still felt I need something as when you take the bellyband off the book is just plain white, so I trialled having the two symbols that make up the overall shape on the front, I think this makes sense as they are not elsewhere in the book and will help people understand straight away that the overall shape is going to be broken down.

I trailled some different positioned for the symbols, I concluded that the two on their own felt a bit lost and not connected, by having the overall shape on the cover as well the reader can see that the two together make the third.

I decided to go with a horizontal format so when the bellyband is on they are hidden from view so that all you can see is the overall shape on the belly band.

While looking at the mock up I began to wonder about the plainness of the appearance and how I could represent the content of the inside of the book, on the outside of the book. So using my mock up I printed off various colours and patterns and wrapped them round the mock up to get a rough idea of what it would like.

I started by trying to incorporate the orange and green solid colours to the book, and while they certainly looked attractive I have decided that I am not going to use them because of how it important they are in the communication of my pattern, and the meaning that they hold in relation to the investigation. The orange represents the new representations of women and the green represents the old stereotypes of women and so by applying them to the books it would mean that one book might relate to that representation and not the other, which isn’t the case. So I do not want to use the slid colours as I do not want to create any messages that I do not mean to communicate.

So I trialled what it would look like to use the grey, the neutral colour in the pattern, however this wasn’t exciting at all and I preferred the uniformness created by the overall white over the grey.

I then trialled using a zoomed in segment of the symbol to create an abstract set of lines. I liked the look and it definitely broke up the plain white however I just felt it was a bit too random. No where else in the pattern do you see the shape zoomed in like that, The only time you see parts of the shape is when it is broken down into it’s specific symbols in the pattern. Therefore I decided not to use it in order to stay true to the shape and it’s relevant symbols. 

I also trailled a belly band made of the shape repeated in a tessellating pattern, however I din’t like it visually and also once again I have not used this anywhere else and do want to detract from the patterns I have created inside the book.

This was the layout I had most trouble with, because most of the book is pattern or text, this page stands out because it has images on it. It was really hard to get a good balance and order to this page, hence why I have so many trials of it. I refer the images in the body text and so I needed a way to label them so I could easily refer to them in the copy. So I trialled numbering them, and then trailled different ways of attaching their number to them. For example in a little box in the image, just underneath the image, in a list after all of the images. However I felt that the numbers was just confusing things further and decided to just use the magazine names the spreads were found in. 

In the end I decided on having a small white box in the corner of each picture with the magazine name in. It kept the image as a rectangles and felt neat and ordered because the text was inside the frame. I am still not happy with this spread but I have completely run out of ideas of how to improve it, so I think I am just going to have to  stick to this neat looking format.

After the first mock up it was brought to my attention there is another way to start the coptic bind so that you do not have the lengths of thread showing on the front and back covers. I trialled the small book with this new start to the bind and it works much better and I think will give a neater look to the overall finish.

 I also trialled a mock up where the cover is the length of the whole book, to hide the size of the small book, a bit more, but I decided that I needed to be brave in my choice to have the smaller book on the front and so should be proud and show it off, not cover it up with a cover.

I then made another mock up (but this time I didn’t bind it) using the actual stocks. I found that when printing on the magazine type paper the colours came out a hell of a lot darker. This meant I had to trial with the print settings to try and achieve the same colours on the other papers. I was not able to attain an exact match but I did get very close.

Looking at both mockups I am now beginning to have second thoughts about using three different stocks. I feel that the mock up before, all be it on copier paper, feels a bit more uniform because of the same plain white stock used throughout. I will have to have a think and maybe get some feedback from others before I make a final decision.

So I got some feedback and I have decided I am going to stick with my original idea of the three stocks. I am going to do this because when I showed the bound mockup to people who did not know what my investigation was about, the flicked open to the front of the big book, where the title is ‘magazines’. They then assumed that the whole of that second book was just about magazines. By having the two stocks this combats this because people can see and feel a difference and so look to the back pages before closing the book.

I made a mock up using just normal copier paper to see how the format would work with the content and to test the binding.

I am really happy with the mock up, I think the two formats together are working well together to create a divide between the two types of information, but yet still show they are connected. Some layouts need adjusting and I still need to typeset all of the text bt they copy and the narrative is working really well.

The folded around key is also really nice, bringing the whole thing together in a neat and informative way.

I did notice that the smaller book at the front did sometimes open of it’s own accord and so I decided to add a belly band for support and to keep the two books together. I think that it is a nice touch and finishes off the overall look of the book.

I ordered some samples of some magazine type stock, the two which were the most like a magazine was claro silk and claro gloss. The quality of both of the stocks were a much better quality than that found in magazines, however this has worked out quite nicely as the content of my investigation is quite serious and is worth noticing, using a cheaper magazine type paper may devalue the content and make it seem throw away, which is not the feel I am aiming for.Therefore the better quality paper gives it the gravity it needs while still resembling and creating ideas of magazines.

I decided to go with the claro gloss as the gloss felt more magazine like than the silk, I think it was partly because it resembled the glossy covers on magazines as well as the stock inside.

One of the problems I had had with the patterns is that by including the front cover in with the pattern it would then make one of the lines odd, as each line is 14 spreads long, meaning that because the fornt cover is a single page the line would then be 15, and so would not fit with the rest of the pattern. So I had left them out, however covers are important because they are what the whole world sees of the magazine, even if they do not buy the magazine, it is what the magazine is telling everyone it is about, and so by using out dated images of women, it is communicating something about the type of magazine it is.

Therefore to combat this problem I have decided to include pictures of the covers with their symbols over the top. Not only does this solve my problem but it actually makes sense because it enables the readers to a) see exactly which magazines were involved in the investigation, b) a reader may not necessarily recognise the name of the magazine but may recognise it’s cover.

Here were just a couple of trials looking at the size of images, I think the smaller images work better, you can still understand and read the images even though they are smaller, so there is no need to have them bigger.

So I haven’t posted in a while and that is because I have been making the patterns! In the end I analysed 27 magazines and 21 newspapers.

I decided on the magazines partly using this website: http://www.betterretailing.com/retailer-resources/top-100-magazines/

which lists the most popular magazines of 2013 so far, and also it was partly what magazines/newspaper I could get hold of easily.

I split the magazines into different sections, focusing on womens and mens magazines and the gender neutral subjects such as food and travel, to avoid any weighted patterns.

For the newspapers I chose the Telegraph and the Guardian, as they are opposite in their political views. I also then chose the Sun, as this is a paper that is not a broadsheet.

Overall it took me a little over a week to make the patterns for all of the publications, this is fine however as I knew it was going to take a while and planned a week for the pattern making, so I am on track!

I then started to think about how these patterns are going to be read in the book. I made two mock ups, one with double spreads in between sections, marking the start of a new category, and one where the patterns follow on from one another. I decided to go with the spreads breaking up the sections, it allows for the reader to have a breather, and not feel bombarded by all the shapes and symbols. It also is easier for comparison and navigation in the book.