Design Principles - What is a Book - Initial Development

Design Principles

What is a book? 
Initial Development

I chose to develop this concept into a full page layout design to see how the composition and overall aesthetic worked. I then planned to have other students evaluate this design through an interim critique to determine if it would be successful if developed for my full publication. 

I took my initial hand rendered sketch and scanned it in to manipulate it digitally, although I was inspired by the hand rendered style of the Babadook Book however I felt digitally manipulating hand rendered imagery will created a similar aesthetic and allow me more experimentation digitally to remove any imperfections. I started by removing the background to leave just the outline of the illustration that  I then start to manipulate. 

I then started to manipulate the image by adjusting the brightness, contrast and saturation to make the line weight darker making the whole more visible. I think this worked well as the image is more dominant and will sit in the page better. 

I then added some sample text as it was only a mock up I found an image of a dictionary entry online and removed that background to demonstrate the effect I wanted to portray with my typesetting, this was far more efficient for the purpose of a simple mock up as the text was already typeset in the style of a dictionary.   I then positioned this 3/4 down the page to balance the composition of the page.  This design works well with the rule of thirds with the text and illustration both intersection the lines.

As further experimentation I inverted the text and illustration and placed them on a dark grey background to see how this contrast worked.  I liked this contrast as I feel it gave the whole design a more sinister aesthetic.  I liked the use of a coloured background however felt the block colour flattened the image and wanted to experiment further with texture. 

I trailed a few different textures however felt that when I inverted the illustration in white the scribbled aesthetic referenced a chalk style medium, I thought about this and felt a chalkboard texture could work well to create a dark sinister aesthetic. When I trailed this I really liked the results as the page was still fail minimal with white space however the texture added another layer among the whole design more engaging. I feel as though this concept could work for my publication and will ask a range of students for their opinions before developing it across the range of my double page spreads.