Amanda Ferris.

My Crash Course in understanding div’s when it comes to HTML.

div—tag (or element), abbreviation of division. A generic container for blocks of content, such as images and paragraphs of text. Can be uniquely identified by an id to hook into aCSS style sheet.

My demonstration by Shane, was this picture! Obviously div’s are structured and not wonky!

Placing ‘squares’ (because everything sits within a box) inside squares and each of those squares represents a div! Circle’s however DO NOT exist.

A fairly simple and funny description I would say!

This is an overview of my whole document set up in Indesign and all the pages I had in my magazine.

My Magazine specs:

Width: 190 mm, Height: 250 mm

Number of pages: 8

Font size: 9pt

Leading: 11pt

Margins: Top 16mm, Inside 20mm, Bottom 23mm, Outside 20mm

Columns: 3, Gutter: 4.233 mm

Bleed; 3 mm

I enjoyed getting used to the software and researching to learn more details about what it could offer me in helping me design my magazine. I had a few troubles with understanding the Baseline Grid, but I got there in the end and managed to use it to my advantage with my layout of text.

The final layout for my booklet designed with my own imagery influenced by interviews with Oded Ezer.

I’m pleased with my final booklet and its ‘cookery book layout’ qualities. Being entirely new to InDesign, it was difficult to get the hang of how things work, but I did in the end. Initially I created my layout without following the correct procedure needed to set up the document, I soon realised that when it became difficult to apply paragraph styles and baseline grid’s further along in the design process. The mediums within the booklet are the combination of biscuit and chocolate experiments, this was because of the length of the interview there was no need to include any more pages into the design. That meant that my book was only four page spreads, and eight single pages if considering it that way. Although having a short interview meant that I only had a few pages, it meant I could focus on developing those few designs. It was a situation where if I did have a longer interview, I would of needed more imagery for variations of design. The colour’s used in the design and entirely from the imagery, either brown from chocolate or the biscuit colour. This was deliberate in order to create a hierarchy of importance of the experimental images on the page. At first glance people would consider these images digitally design, but by having a simple layout with an equal balance of white space, it makes the reader consider; is that real? My target audience would be around the age of students and up, the selection of people that would read The creative review, design magazines and have a general inspiration for aspiring to other designers.  My font choice was an easy decision, I flipped through all the possibilities looking for a font that had no sans serif, small in general in size and complimented the imagery rather than taking the attention away from it. The font was Calibri, it’s one I use fairly regularly because of it’s all rounded look of simple but not too serious. Page layout, I found very easy to let the images determine where the text should be in relation. Initially I started with the biscuit centre page at the beginning, I soon realised it was this that was throwing me off track when it came to adding the chocolate, which is the reason for spacing each element in order throughout the booklet. I chose to repeat the layout of three columns per page in order to help the pages fit together. I thought I would need to because of the differences between the imagery that I used throughout.

If I was to change anything about the process or design, I would of possibly taken a different route in the image experimenting. At the beginning of my experiments, I experimented with hand drawn type, decorating each letter how I felt worked with the letterform. Looking back to that it would have been an interesting study to have taken that further and developed the drawings on a much bigger scale, and a lot more variations. Only because I think that would have been a lot more opportunities to develop that work, whereas my food experiments were difficult to develop upon. Although I would change my processes, I would of still used the same designer. I thoroughly enjoyed listened to him and genuinely found him inspiring. When it came to printing, I had difficulty in understanding the layout of the PDF document. I assumed that the printer would understand, that each spread would be arranged correctly. How wrong I was when I received a booklet back in the wrong order. That was a lot of hassle to get that sorted and in the end I had it printed on 160gsm paper that’s not card but not paper, and stapled; This helped get it printed in time and have a physical booklet. If I had organised my time better, I would have considered a thicker cover, and silk inside pages with a shine finish to the images. This has been an enjoyable project to take on and create. Especially having to develop the imagery ourselves, that’s what made this project unique.

This is the last of the imagery I aim to use, i took both my biscuit and chocolate experiments and created one that fit in with the theme of the other imagery i’ve created.

This final edit is of the biscuit experiment’s creating typography. The Naive lettering is a word that Oded Ezer described himself as, or characteristic he wants to continue to remain. This is the biscuit experiment I want to use within my designs to arrange the text around.

After my chocolate experiments, I put my chocolate alphabet into photoshop and represented a quotation from my interview that demonstrated something about Oded Ezer, e.g and idea into who he is.

Arranging the layout of the quote took a while, however this final result I created with the idea of mirroring the layout with my text which should work.

These are three pages from a book about 3D typography. It became just as helpful with typography as effective book layout.

I’ve decided to go with a similar layout theme, with a white background balanced by  the imagery and text; Much like a cookery book layout, that identifies the most important part of the layout being the images of food. Which is my case is exactly the same as my imagery…is made out of food. 

All of three of these pages have a good balance of text and imagery. The book’s focus is on the imagery so there’s very little text, but how it’s positioned works within the overall layout’s of each page. I love the isolation of imagery that has no background. Instead the outlines of the shapes are the image, and the white space of the page becomes it’s background. It’s a similar look I aim to create with my design.