Print-on-demand mock-up

June 2016

Whether or not you intend to produce a book to present your photographs for Assignment 5, suppose for this exercise that you will. During this exercise you'll familiarise yourself with a print-on-demand application and experiment with book design.

If you don't already have one, set up an account with a print on demand service such as Blurb. (You don't have to use Blurb, but whichever company you use must offer the option as saving your book draft as a PDF document.)

You'll need to download Booksmart software from their site. This application is fairly intuitive. Import the photos you've made so far for Assignment 5 into the new project. Experiment with layout, text, titles and captions; when you are satisfied with a draft, save it as a PDF. If you are using Blurb the PDF will be watermarked with their logo but this doesn't matter. If you're keeping your learning log online, link this document into a blog post. 

You don't need to place an order for the book for this exercise.

Make some notes about how you found working with the software and briefly evaluate your rough book design, describing any particular design choices in terms of other books that inspired you.

If you are thinking about producing a book for your self directed project, you may want to email the PDF or send a link to your tutor for their comments.

Book cover

In the footsteps of the Great Heathen Army book (1st page intentionally left blank) (Please click on link - Blogger does not support this PDF)

Initially Blurb software was limiting. I tried Lightroom CC whose template is similar to Blurb but I thought it was easier to work with the Blurb software. When placing photographs into Blurb, there was no provision for placing them into anything other than the set layouts, although I could increase and decrease the photo size. Because I was already looking at mixing square and landscape images, my book was not uniform. There is no spell or punctuation checker so it is time consuming to copy the text into word and back again. The box for inserting text is small, so moving the slider bars all the time making it quite difficult to check what has been written previously. A map image I included where overlaid information onto a map produced quite a small file size which the programme queried. An ebook does not have as many font choices as a printed book. Fonts can be serif or sans serif (without the small lines attached to the end of the letters). I chose Garamont for my typeface which is often used in books with it being easy to read, elegant around since the 16th Century. 

Google drive does not support PDF documents over 25MB, meaning that a secondary site has to open the document, even when it is reduced to 11MB.

A fellow Landscape Photography student and I visited the Martin Parr Exhibition in Wakefield, where the Hepworth Gallery had several photobooks available to read. I took notes on the designs I liked. One of the suggestions from my tutor was to include some draft comments I made on the contact sheet into the book. It was hard to fit this into the thread of the book, but reading Joel Mayerovitz by Colin Westerwood, I thought the layout and content may work with my book design.

Informal, relaxed style of writing about the photographs . Photos on the right which is the most eye-catching place for them to be. Large margin around the photographs allowing space where space is needed. I used this layout because I thought it worked well. Martin Parr uses photos on both sides of the paper or sometimes in groups with a blank page representing another chapter. I tried this and I think it would work but I preferred a more classical layout for this project.

 Martin Parr's book to accompany the exhibition has the accompanying text printed on pink (or rhubarb) coloured paper! This creates excess blank sheets at the back due to the printing process which costs more as the self publisher is paying for insertion of pages. 

Martin Parr lists the copyright and acknowledgements at the beginning of his book. This was a discussion point as feedback received from my fellow student was that perhaps her copyright page should go at the back? 

Another photobook which appealed to me was Alex Soth  and Brad Zellar's photo newspaper stories as exhibited at "Gathered Leaves" in Bradford.

Notes from the exhibition page on my blog: "I was interested in the photo newspaper stories produced by  Alec Soth, in particular the way it looked more like a photobook than a newspaper, but told the story of his and Brad's (his writer) escapades to capture the story. 

It ties in with how much writing I should include on the page for assignment 5, where should captions go - left, right, centre,  or plate indexes, page numbers or not "

The final 2 photos from the Misissipi project do not fit, although they are informal. I felt in a way it tied people to places and may be useful for reference in future.

References

Parr, M. (2016) The rhubarb triangle and other stories. Wakefield: The Hepworth, Wakefield

Soth, A. (2006) Niagara. Little Brown Mushroom Publishing Company: Minnesota

Soth, A. and Zellar, B. (2012) Upstate. 1st Edition, Little Brown Mushroom Publishing Company: Minnesota

Westerbeck, C. (2005) Joel Meyerowitz. London: Phaidon