Whew! It has been an eternity since I have updated this blog. I have had yet another amazing, busy (more than ever), light speed quarter at UCLA. This quarter was my first time taking classes in my new major, Design | Media Arts, and its safe to say that I love it. I never thought that I would be able to do what I did for fun before, just design, on a daily basis. I’ll admit sometimes it can get tedious when there is a lot of work to do, but when I stop and look at what I get to do and what I get to make, I’m really satisfied. My homework = doing what I love. That’s pretty special.
Up until the end of last year I was pretty positive that I didn’t want to be any kind of art major. I didn’t think it was “practical” – to some degree I still don’t. Just that art degree by itself is going to afford me very little to nothing; it’s going to matter a lot more how I put my name in important places and on the lips of important people so that when I descend off the college cliff in 2013, I’m rappelling, not jumping. But hey, I’ll figure that out. Not going to worry too much about the future right now and just enjoy the present and put as much effort as I can into my current work.
Speaking of my current work, below are some pictures of my culminating project for my Typography and Letterforms class taught by Brian Roettinger (http://handheldheart.com/). To describe the class a little, we focused on working with type – setting type in paragraphs, in single lines, in titles, in a variety of other settings, in ways that created hierarchy and improved design. All the work we did in the class was with Times New Roman, a type face that I initially didn’t like. But working with that typeface definitely gave me an appreciation for the letterforms and the general feel of the font.
Each week we each designed 10 book covers for Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. But we didn’t have free reign. First off we were given specific passages of text that we had to use in every single design. Secondly, each week had specific guidelines. The first week, for example, we could only design in Times New Roman size 9; the title, author, description, subtitle, etc, all had to be in size 9. The second week, we could use any size of Times New Roman, but each design could only use one size. So if I chose for my title to be in size 22, all other text on the page had to be size 22. Each week, restrictions were lifted and ingredients were added and by the final week, we were designing in full color, with any size font variation, front and back covers, and dealing with a variety of options. Here is the final result!
My book was composed of 8 signatures (sections folded in half, then nested and sewed together at one end). Each signature represented a week of work.
These signatures were then bound together by bookbinding glue (lots of it) in a ‘perfect bind’.
The final book. Honestly, pretty proud of it. Feels pretty damn good to have something that I made – and not just one part, every single part. Pages hand cut, hard cover case hand cut, hand bound, hand glued, hand stiched, all enclosing my design. Feels nice.
The cover itself is something that turned out particularly well – I just printed with a laser jet onto bookbinding cloth. If you can see, there’s some subtle text appearing in the background behind the main title. The text itself is a couple of well known quotes from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. This book cover design was far different from my original idea, but was a lucky product of the materials I had. When I tried printing white or grey on the black cloth, it just turned out black. But somehow, that black ink, subtle, looked very nice and low key classy, so I decided to incorporate as a barely visible but undoubtedly present part of the cover.
Here is one of my classmate’s (Mindy) books! I wish I could show more but I don’t have pictures of them. Mindy got really creative throughout the quarter, creating a lot of interactive, fold up, pop up covers for the book. Her final book was a collection of 8 pamphlets (one for each week) that were bound together by a sleeve and could be take out and viewed individually.
Final lessons from this project – Bookbinding is expensive. Be careful. Measure twice, cut once. It might be simple, but it aint easy.
Haha – as you can see, I’m pretty enthusiastic about this stuff; I could ramble on forever and ever, but I’ll let you go. Here’s to updating more often though! You will definitely see more of me very soon.
Best,
PChew
