This is the book with the vellum book jacket taken off. I love the texture of the pages, which was created because the pages were folded against the grain for the french folds. This complies with my concept because the rough edges simulate the actual construction of a building after the blueprints are created.
I made a vellum book jacket for my book because vellum is often used in architecture for designing buildings. I also made it so that the designed letters that look as if they were drawn on blueprints are covered by a "finished" letter, like the stages of designing a building.
this is the cover of my book without the vellum jacket, and showcases my designed typeface and the blueprint paper.
this is the cover spread of chapter two. Each chapter has a page like this, where the letters creating each chapter are drawn out as shown
this is a spread to show the general layout of the body pages. You can see the blue spot color applied into the text along with black, and the margin edges.
For this project, we took an existing book, The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr, and redesigned it by developing a concept design and applying it throught the entire book while maintaining good typography. My concept for the redesign was 'The Blueprints of Writing.' I got to this concept by reading the book and coming to the understanding that it was about grammar and basic writing techniques and skills. After realizing this, I then made the connection that grammar is like the skeleton, or basics of good writing. I made the connection to architecture because the blueprints of a building design are like the basics, displaying the skeleton of the building and the schematics. This led me to my 'Blueprints of Writing' concept.
I applied this concept throughout the book by developing an alphabet for the cover, title pages, and beginning chapter pages that was based off the Meta typeface. I created a look through vectors and lines that made it seem as if the letters had been drawn onto blueprint paper, complete with hashmarks and measurements. This was my main visual for my concept, and it was very successful. This was my favorite part of the project. It took a lot of process to get to the end result, because I started with a completely hand-drawn typeface I created myself, based off of nothing but the basics of a letter, not any specific typeface. It developed into what you now see on the page.
Another big part of the design of the book is the pages themselves. I used very thin, cream paper and french folded the book. This means that my spreads in indesign were all messed up. The fold of the page in the actual book that is the outside of the page was actually the center of the page in Indesign. This took a bit of trial and error to figure out how to make it work, but I did it. I chose to use french folds because of the texture it gave the edges of the pages as well as the idea of blueprint paper being very thin. I wanted the pages of my book to be thin like blueprint paper generally is, but I didn't want the book to feel cheap and subpar as a result, so by using french folds, the book ends up being twice as thick as it would have been with just thin paper.
Other elements of my book design include the blue of the blueprint paper carried throughout the book as a spot color, the architectural design to the page layouts, and the vellum book jacket. The margins of the page were decided upon by connecting points of the page with diagonal lines where the crosses of each line created the points of the margin box. It was developed using architectural rules and ideals, so I thought it an appropriate way to design the book.
All in all, this project took about a month and a half to complete, due to all the research, dummy books, and trial and error that went into it. It ended up being a very successful project.
