Design Principles Session 3: What is a Book? - OUGD404

This weeks session was more of a practical session which allowed us to explore the idea of a grid and learn more about layout. We started off by discussing the elements that are on a grid and how they work in conjunction with one another. 

We then was asked to select a layout and think about the graphic elements that made up the spread. This was to think about the design decisions the designer had made and how these have been worked onto a grid:

We then thought about thumbnails, we proportioned the thumbnail so we would get a accurate scale of the format we would be using. This is so once taken digitally is it an similar representation to the digital version.

I used the content from the previous layout to create some initial thumbnails. I have thought about the different ways I can manage the information on the page. I have tried experimenting with scaling the imagery over both spreads while also thinking about how I could crop into images and scale them down. I tried to always keep the right amount of body copy to give a fair representation of the content:

For the next session I need to have thought about and finalised the format I will be using for my 10 double page spreads. I have researched into a few book formats that I found interesting and from this created a few thumbnails around these. I started initial thumbnails with the content from of my spreads by using a A4 format. This was effective as it allowed enough room for both text and image. However I would like to use a more interesting format, as I would like to be more creative with the size of my DPS. Because of this, I looked into formats with 2:1 ratios, square and landscape formats. I have done initial thumbnails with each of these formats to get an idea on how I could use them for effective layouts and compositions. I am having difficulty deciding on which would be the most effective for the amount of content I will be using. I need a good amount of space to achieve this. I think I may discuss this with peers and have a small critique on which format would be the best to use: