|
More than the sum of its parts
Barbara Sudick of California State University Chico's Communication Design program teaches a course in publication design. She takes her students through all the mechanics of creating books, from type to grids, from images to bindings. She lays a foundation for understanding the long tradition of book-making, then challenges her students to stretch the rules, extending their concept of the book.
Keith A. Smith — A philosophical guide to book design
Students start by reading Keith A. Smith's essay, The Book as Physical Object. Classroom discussions help them develop a thorough understanding of Smith’s text and its message. A combination of reading, field trips and hands-on exercises support the development of students’ knowledge of the fundamentals of book design. Once the foundation has been laid, Sudick asks the students to design their own books around Smith’s essay. Using his concepts as a spring board for the development of their own ideas, they are asked to author parallel text and create original images that support their self-generated themes. If, as Smith says, the form of the book depends on its intentions, the possibilities are nearly endless. Instead of competing to design similar kinds of documents in response to faculty-defined assignments, students must establish their own approach: They shape a concept, scope, size, and materials for their project.
Learning a new tool together
CSU Chico changed its page layout tool from Quark XPress to Adobe InDesign® this year, and many students were learning the tool for the first time in the course. Because each student's project is unique, developing over an extended period, and because all the students learn the new layout tool together, they frequently collaborate. They report that InDesign is very intuitive because of their familiarity with other Adobe tools and that the Help menu is highly useful for learning the powerful features their complex projects require.
Different approaches
Lindsay Loebel was very affected by the maxim in Keith Smith's statement that "The book is a physical object. The hand-held book demands touching." Her book project, Seasoned Paper, is all about the physical qualities of paper, the medium on which books are printed. She used papers of various textures, scanned paper, and die-cuts to create a tactile experience for the reader on every page.
Yuka Minai's book project was inspired by her first attempt at authorship. She had created a story for her parents at age 9 about Santa Claus' trip, drawing images on a scroll accompanied by Japanese calligraphy. She used photographs of her original drawings with English text translating the Japanese tale. The colophon of her book shows a photograph of Yuka as a college student holding the scroll she created many years earlier. The book project caused Yuka to examine her early interests in storytelling and illustration and in Western culture. This introspective approach to creating a book helped Yuka find the source of her choice to study graphic design in the United States.
Chelsea Moriarty's book project is bound with needle and thread, a metaphor for her explorations not only of how a book's structure fits its content, but also a comment on the nature of communication. She compares communication to weaving, the visual metaphor in her publication, which is titled Weaving the Intangible. All the photos feature woven objects and different types of information that change direction to correspond with the weft and warp of woven items. She added a clear front cover to the book to suggest a computer screen, but left physical threads in place to contrast the cover decoration of digitally created ones.
Jessie Hopkins created a publication that likens reading a book to finding one's way through a landscape. His book, Driving Between the Lines, offers the Keith Smith text as a small book-within-a-book paired with his own larger format original text and photographs of landscapes and cityscapes. His design orients the reader through the publication with a feeling of taking a driving trip.
Catherine Carlos has long held the conviction that anything you can conceive becomes real and tangible. She wanted to create a book that would stimulate readers' imagination and offer them new realities. Her project, Conception, uses her own abstract photographs layered with die cuts through the cover and various pages to create a sense of peering through windows at images that grow and morph with the reader's perspective.
Dana Adams wanted her book to entrap its reader, captivating him or her with her words and images. She used the metaphor of a bird within a cage as the organizing concept for her publication. Dana filled the book with her own bird illustrations and words that evoke emotions. She enlisted a friend to create a cage for the book and on the colophon page left a feather, suggesting that while now free, the experience of "entrapment" in the book leaves a remnant that continues to touch the reader.
"More than the sum of its parts."
Sudick's students report that creating a book from start to finish challenged them as few other projects have. Each of them mastered new skills from layout to printing to bookbinding. For the students, the project is more than the sum of these various new competencies — it set them each on a journey that drew from, and above all, enhanced their creativity and imagination.
|
