DESIGNER'S GUIDE TO PRINT
A handy print guide for designers and amateurs alike
This project was based on ‘The Print Handbook’ which is a useful little book containing all the necessary information for printing all kinds of projects. I identified the target audience as: Graphic designers – both professional and amateur, print houses and general public interested in design and/or printing techniques.
From this, I concluded that this audience needed the essentials of print to be communicated in an easily accessible manner, therefore the design of the book needed to reflect that.
In order to appeal to the audience, I felt the design elements needed to be clean, clear and have a fairly universal application.
Brainstorming produced an array of ideas from a fun style with a little character guiding the audience through the book, to basic shapes and colours that would help to focus audience attention on the content.
After some visual investigation into some of these concepts, being sure to think about colour combinations and possible textures or patterns, I narrowed down the concepts I wanted to focus on, to three: ripples, spiral and geometric/inside of a snowflake.
The ripples symbolize a small idea becoming larger and more profound over time. The spiral concept came from the golden ratio and the Fibonacci spiral. Although, such a spiral is heavily rooted in the history and culture of design, I wanted to make it my own and so looked into stylizing it.
Lastly, the geometric pattern which is my interpretation of the inside of a snowflake – with jagged edges and sharp angles – was symbolic of delving deeper into what may seem like a simple object or event from the outside.
By creating illustrator iterations of these concepts, I was able to picture how they would function in a document. It became clear quite quickly that both the spiral and ripple designs were not going to be practical taking the content of the book into account. The geometric made a good repeating pattern for the chapter title pages and I liked that it was just black and white as it allowed me to add interest in different ways, such as using dots and stripes.
The end product is a stylish book made up of mainly black and white with little pops of colour throughout. All the chapter title page patterns are the same, although a different colour is allocated to each chapter. This colour then dictates the colour of the imagery for the chapter.
There are a couple of cool features to the book that may not be immediately apparent from the images. Firstly, this book has been die-cut on both it’s front and back covers. This was in an effort to introduce a specialty finish as a means of demonstration as well as to immediately engage the reader. The rich teal of the inside cover shows through the gaps and adds some colour to the cover.
Another somewhat interactive feature of this book is the paper page. In order to demonstrate the different thicknesses and quality of different papers, I carefully glued triangular samples of eight different paper types into the book. These samples are so shaped so that the reader may lift the sample and feel the thickness and quality of the paper. A description for each paper sample is written below them.
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