Making of 2.5
Okay, I don’t think Alec read the letter. I’m over it. Thought I’d do a post on the making of 2.5.
Before I get into the specific design, a quick word on constraints. I love them. Unbridled creative genius - yeah, it ain’t me babe. But give me a good set of limitations and I’m in heaven. Working with physical objects has really driven this home for me. Certain things just cannot be done with the materials at hand, and these boundaries serve as a useful guide (or a hand that grabs you in the dark and directs you where to go - as my music teacher likes to say). The thought of sitting with a blank InDesign document with it’s unlimited possibilities is frightening - I mean where do I even begin?
Who needs InDesign? Pencil and paper will do just fine.
So let’s take a look at my process for 2.5. First and foremost it was meant to be a vehicle for 4x6” fiber-based prints. This meant that the paper had to be thick enough to resist the natural curling of the prints. Also, the binding would have to be an album-style binding to create enough space within the book to prevent flaring when closed. I thought 8x10” would be a suitable finished size - leaving an inch border on the sides and some nice negative space top and bottom.
Having just come back from SCRAP, I did have a few paper options:
Black card stock - classic but boring.
Large sheets of bright Canson Mi Tientes - too precious to use all of it up on a single project.
Assorted colors of pastel card stock - what I ended up going with. Although the drawback (or constraint!) was that it was pre-cut into 12x12” squares.
My two binding options were either a long-stitch style, or a more classic case binding (with added tabs for spacing at the spine). For the first option I would need to fold 16x10” sheets into 8x10” folios, but given that I was working with 12x12” squares this wouldn’t be possible. I could made the case binding work though, since I only needed to fold a tab at one edge. Decision made - case binding it would have to be!
Quick mock-up to visualize the binding structure.
Of course I didn’t have enough sheets in a single color for the entire book, so I decided to mix and match in a way that a change in color matched with a change in “chapter”. Form follows function.
For the endpapers I would need to have larger sheets, so I did dig into my stash of Canson Mi-Tientes. I don’t even know how precious this paper actually is, if at all, but a bookbinder whose work I love uses it for end papers and so it’s gotta be the real deal. I went with a muted purple which actually matches the first page quite perfectly.
For the cover (or ahem, “case” as we refer to it in the business), my initial thought was all black with inset photo, and embroidered title in one of the paper colors. But again constraints! I didn’t have a large enough sheet of black bookcloth, so I added a beige spine to free up some material. For the title I didn’t have thread in the right colors, so kept it simple with black on beige. In terms of the placement of the title, my initial thought was below the photo aligned to the right - but of course that changed in response to this new constraint as well.
Well that’s about it for the design process. The nice thing about working this way was that I didn’t have to have the entire thing figured out from the outset. I just needed to go one step at a time, and make decisions as I went along. While I had a sense of how the finished product may turn out, it was exciting to see how it was actually evolving at each stage - in a way that a digital workflow could never match.