Today’s Plan:
- What Should We Be Thinking About?
- Book Covers
- Image Resources
- Sketches / Mock Ups
- Homework
What Should We Be Thinking About?
Page Layout
Katrina: author bios in Typehouse
Katrina: line length (what we don’t want to do)
Emma: Include an appropriate number of columns. Don’t overdo it to the point where you have, say, a 10 pt. font/have to shrink the font. Unless you have to fit everything into a certain number of pages, don’t use more than two or three columns; it’ll look like too much information is being crammed into one page. (Example)
Emma: Line-length. It helps to break a large amount of text up into columns so it feels less heavy. Metazine has a lot of text that takes up the whole page and it feels very unapproachable. On the other hand, “We Make Zines” breaks the text into columns, which makes it much easier to handle.
Trent: “Considering we are making a zine about a collection of poetry, an anthological design with a large heading and novel-like base text might be best.” The copy we have is a mix of poetry and prose: so we are going to have to think about/experiment with margins and padding–can this be something we repeat on every page? Can we shift the margins to accommodate prose copy? Etc.
White Space
This zine uses a lot of space. The amount of text wouldn’t take up more than a page if it weren’t for the graphics. This is something that children’s books will do a lot, where the story is just as much in the visual as the words. Everything is so spaced out and simple, and it does what it needs to do and does so very calmly. It creates a calming tone and easy readability. The inverse could be effective too; the more condensed text would create unease and tension. The way the pages are filled up can have a huge effect on tension and release.
Typography (style)
Maddie: handwriting
Kristie: Line-spacing. Keep line spacing consistent. In the Typehouse magazine, the first poem has less space between the lines than the rest of the print, which is very distracting
Joshua: “Maintain authorial integrity and — especially in poetry — maintain the same basic shape as how it is given to you. This is perhaps less fundamental in prosaic pieces, wherein the form matters less than the content, but it should be nonetheless duly considered. Just in case.” I think there’s an interesting question about how much license we have to play with poetic typography. Let’s talk EE Cummings.
Using Images
Maddie: balancing text and images
Katrina: small drawings
Trent: Zine’s photography is also interesting to note because it too depends on the content of the zine. For instance, in Hustler, a zine about rock and roll, the pictures are very energetic, busy and typically the background for the typography, but in the Bald Mouse zine the pictures seldom interact with the typography and are more calm/less distracting to the words yet still add a little bit of flavor to the overall design. It would be interesting how the tone of our magizines will shape and be shaped by the pictures we use. (An example of this being bad is the zine “Generation: Fuck You” which depicts its generational angst with standard 12 point arail font and a single bolded headings.)
Cam: Something important from this Zine is how the drawings interact with the text. The way the text is laid out creates a physical space for the figures, like an object the drawing could see if they were alive. There is a man leaning on a block of text on page 16 which emphasizes the physicality of the text. I don’t think elements have to interact as literally as these ones do, but keeping a cohesive space where the elements acknowledge the existence of others on the page is very important. (Looking at Bald Mouse)
Aesthetic Feel/Tone/Theme
Trent: It should also be questioned whether our zine should look bad. Most of these zines do look bad. They range in quality from parodying the 1990’s web page craze to full on professionally done magazines that I am still unconvinced weren’t actually regular magazines. There’s a camp quality to zines like All Out Monster Revolt which adds a particularly fun feel to the zine and it wouldn’t be that hard to included in our own zine.
Molly: homemade feel.
Austin:
The rock & roll zine I looked at does a lot with organizing the text in different ways with each page. This could be distracting if we use too much deviation, especially if we go with more color, but the way a text in a zine is laid out can be a work of art in itself.
Juniper:
Most of the designs that caught my eye were minimalist designs. Some others caught my eye because of just how absurd and flashy they were – That being said, many of the flashy ones worked well for this medium because of how homemade and personal they looked. […] Simplicity would be my biggest takeaway, the design of some zines that I found was very busy and distracting, I’m a fan of the minimalist styles.
Cam:
Keeping the interior is important as well. You don’t want a book that looks like a movie script, or some anecdote about dentistry the house no one likes always hands out on Halloween. There are a lot of ways to make the pages interesting, such as graphics, or color if available. Even using spacing cleverly or text size is a way to do so. (Good example, Bad example).
Book Covers
As we design book covers, we should be thinking about all the basic crap.
- Contrast and Focal Point (although this is a black and white design, we still want to draw attention)
- Alignment and/as Rule of Thirds (if you use a background image, think about how to crop it)
- Typography (how to balance two fonts, how to create an intriguing yet readable title, etc)
- Proximity / White Space / Margins and Padding (where do we put the title? Is it the focal point?)
Image Resources
I don’t imagine everyone will design a cover that uses an image–but some of you might. Even if your cover doesn’t use images, I would like to see images positioned inside your layout. Here’s where we can get images that can be used for free (although many of these require attributions–we can talk about how to handle that next week).
Homework
In Friday’s class we will design your book cover in Photoshop–make sure you have a final mock-up to digitize.
