Book Jackets and End Pages

Here are the full book jackets and two end page designs.

Revisions

These are revisions from critique from classmates and my professor. The table of contents do not have the color hue/overcast that they do on here, something went wonky when uploading them on here.

Inspiration

I encourage all designers/artists to check out designspiration.net if you haven't already. It is a website packed full of inspiration for anything and everything. 

Enjoy!

Title Pages, Table of Contents, Bios and a Nifty Publications Logo

Possible Final Layout

I designed this layout after talking with my group and progressively working in class and asking opinions. This is what I have so far, and I dig it.

Revised Layouts

Layout 1

Layout 2

Project 4: Creating a Book

YAY FINAL PROJECT!!!

Our final project for BDS 102 is creating a book. For this book we were asked to choose an artist, from our field or not, and write up an essay of sorts about them. From there we created three sets of two double page spreads including work from our artist. I chose Daido Moriyama as my artist, he is a street photographer. I recently did a project in my photo media 101 class over him and have grown to love his work.

Today in class we critiqued each others spreads and figured out what else we need to design, along with getting in our groups and deciding on a book title and where things will go in the book. I'm pretty excited because I am paired up with three other photographer students who chose photographers as well, so we get our very own book of photographers. Our book is called "The Photo Book," simple and to the point because we think that our photographers are all fairly minimal and simple. The other photographers in our book are Cindy Sherman, Diane Arbus, and Annie Leibovitz.

Layout 1

Layout 2

Layout 3

Collaging

These are photos I took the other day in class while I was working on a way to layout my collage. The main bunch of the set was an idea I had with Margie to kind of have pictures of Gus sleeping or looking innocent in a grid like form and then have a place that was frantic and had a lot of overlay and was him playing.

After showing this to Margie again, up on the wall and getting some feedback from other classmates and the TA we decided to have more space between things and to have more of a narrative.

So this is my final idea and what I am working on.

An Idea

I had been talking with Margie about how I should present my collage of my cat Gus. She had an idea of taking close up photos of my cat and kind of reconstructing that as a collage to make a bigger version of him. I thought that would be totally awesome, but then I never got around to taking those pictures. 

So then I thought, well what if I had the silhouette of a cat and put the collage of Gus into that. Have the overall outline as the cat. 

So I tried that and got some feedback from classmates and it was a good idea but Margie brought up that you look at the overall thing, you see the cat silhouette when I'm wanting you to see the cat in the photos. So it was back to the drawing board.

"Photography Changes Everything" by Marvin Heiferman Reflection

What I got from Marvin Heiferman's article is the title, exactly. Ironic ay?

He talked about how photographs have changed, the meaning behind them, the way we take photographs, the things we use photographs for, everything about them, and it all has changed. Even in my 22 years, well I'll say like 12 because I was young before and hardly knew anything but that's beside the point, photography has changed so much in my time. My first real camera was a Minolta 3, it was a film camera and I loved it. I still love it, I miss film. Shooting film is something kind of magical that not a lot of the kids of today will really understand. Then I moved up to digital about two years ago when my mom bought me my Canon Rebel T3. It's my baby. And as much as I love digital, it's something new and different, even still.

Now-a-days everyone can be a photographer though. You don't have to have a big, fancy camera to be a "photographer" and that kind of pisses me off. Just because you have a camera on your phone and post selfies and pictures of sunsets with filters on your Instagram account does not make you a photographer, it makes you a "photographer." By that I mean, yeah you take the time to snap a picture of something you like but is it worthy? Is it worthy of being shown in the Smithsonian or MoMa? I mean, we are kind of getting to that age where yeah that could happen if it's a compelling series or something but, I still think it's just a bunch of baloney.

And Heiferman talks about this in the article, talking about the changing of the medium and the meanings of photographs. To me, I love the old way, I love film and Polaroids. And that will always be a form of photography but it might start to get over shadowed by the Insta-famous generation we live in.

Heiferman also makes a point about other kinds of photographers and the differences in what makes a good photograph. And it's a valid point. Not only does everyone see something differently when they look at a photograph, but depending on your background or your occupation you can see photographs differently too. He mentioned being asked to sit in on a photography talk at the Smithsonian with others to talk about it and was surrounded by a geographer, an astrophysicist, a former director of a major art museum and an information analyst for the CIA. Weird stuff, but they all have to look at photographs and look at them differently because of their profession and what they are needing to look for or are looking at.

Photography is a weird thing. I dig it.