Questions

_ How many characters is optimal for a line length? words per line? 40 to 50
_ Why is the baseline grid used in design? It gives a nice horizon line across the page and makes it clearer for the eye to look across your page.
_ What is a typographic river? The lines that the leading makes across your page
_ From the readings what does clothesline or flow line mean? Line across the top/bottom/ middle of the page that all the paragraphs hang on.
_ How can you incorporate white space into your designs? connect the text and title together or vice versa.
_ What is type color/texture mean? Using different bold, italic and size of text. Also the tracking, leading and weight of the text.
_ What is x-height, how does it effect type color? The height that the lowercase x meets. It makes it easier or harder to differenciate between capital letters and lower case which is what has to do with how you read the page.
_ What are some ways to indicate a new paragraph. Are there any rules? Dont indent a the first paragraph, the size f the indent matters it should be less than 1/2 inch. There should be no space between the paragraphs if indented.
_ What are some things to look out for when hyphenating text. There should be no two letters left behind, no words shorter than 5 letters should be hyphenated. dont hyphenate names or proper nouns.
_ What does CMYK and RGB mean? cmyk- cyan, magenta, yellow, and black rgb- red, green, blue
_ What does hanging punctuation mean? The quotes or other punctuation that stand outside the text box.
_ What is the difference between a foot mark and an apostrophe? foot mark- straight two lines apostrophe- curved two lines
_ What is the difference between an inch mark and a quote mark (smart quote)? Inch mark is straight while quote mark is curved
_ What is a hyphen, en dash and em dashes, what are the differences and when are they used. en dash- opt. shift, hypen-, em dash- opt. shift -
_ What are ligatures, why are they used, when are they not used, what are common ligatures. legability, using ffi, fi ffl, to be one letter. but they dont use when they are tracked out.

Journal #4

Who is Bruce Mau? He is a visionary and world leading innovator who has several huge clients that he designs for. Not only does he have several large clients, but he also does work for children's books and even founded a company called Institution without Boundaries. This company does work to promote change in the world today.

Why is he interesting to us? His motto is, "Now that we can do anything, what can we do?" I think this a good motto for us to follow because it not only gets us to think about what we are doing with our project but also makes us think about the bigger picture and where our spreads will be seen and what sort of place they will be seen in.

What is the mantra you have chosen and why? Go Deep. I chose this because he says, "The deeper you go the more likely you are to find something of value." I think this is a really good idea to do when you are stuck on a project. You need to explore all possibilities of that project and in exploring you will come up with some idea that will be brilliant and original. The more time you put into something, the more you can get out of it.

Book Rebranding Finals!

Intriguing Secret

Silent Hesitation

Simplistic Mystery

Journal 3

Scott McCloud: "Comics gives you two panels to see and also something to see between the lines." I think that this could really be used in making our covers and layouts because the fact that the panels are folded under makes them, "hidden" thus giving you something to imagine that is on them. How they relate to the front and back cover will give the viewer more of a hint or less of a hint in which are on them.

J.J. Abrams: "Mystery is more important than knowledge". If people are curious about why your cover is designed the way it is or why something is on your cover they will be intrigued to figure out what it is about.

What makes a good design good? How do you know if you are designing for something that is bad?

Journal 1

Writer's Toolbox:

This article explains the need behind writing to create ideas about projects. An example of doing this would be a mind map, word web, word lists or overall free writing. Here is an example of one of my many word lists that I created in relation to my book covers

Audience Personas

Maddie lives in a small town in Ohio. She wakes up at 6:30 am to go to her small high school. Her class is only 50 people. Everyone in her town knows everyone’s names. After school, she goes to the local mall/ three stores, and hangs out with some friends. She must be home by 6:00 pm every night because that is when her mother has dinner ready for her two brothers and her. After dinner she promptly goes upstairs and does her homework, hoping to finish early so she can possibly watch the new Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on TV tonight.

Cady is from Houston, Texas and is a very social person. Everyone remembers her name and loves her. She is the class president, head of several clubs and even plays on the soccer team. She is an extremely busy person but always finds time to hang out with her younger siblings. She gets good grades, has tons of friends, is loved by her whole community, and already has four college scholarship offers as a sophomore.

Whitney is a very shy person. She is from a Copper, Colorado. Her parents are both very successful people and are well-liked by their community. Its not that she doesn’t get along well with the other kids, its just that she chooses to keep to herself. After school, she comes home, grabs a cookie from the cookie jar, and sits down to watch Without a Trace. She is always fascinated by others lives.

Journal 2

The ten most important principles for design (according to Dieter Rams):

Good Design is Innovative- new age technology offers help in innovative design and offers never ending possibilities.

Good design makes a product useful- it will emphasize the usefulness of the product making it easier for the user to understand why they would need the product.

Good design is aesthetic- Things we use everyday might be ugly but can be designed to draw the viewer/ consumer in.

Good design makes a product understandable- Hopefully the product design is self-explanatory, drawing the viewer in.

Good design is unobtrusive- It should leave room for the viewer/ user’s self-expression.

Good design is honest- It does not make promises it cannot keep.

Good design is long-lasting- It should be able to last many years.

Good design is thorough, down to the last detail- Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

Good design is environmentally-friendly- it conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product,

Good design is as little design as possible- less is better.

Don Norman on Design:

Basically He talks about ways in which functional design helps the overall product and feel. A functional design can make you happy, mad or even sad. He also talks about three main ideas on why humans like design; Visceral, Behavior, and Reflective. Visceral meaning when we are drawn to certain colors and the "feel" of the piece. Behavior meaning they are easily understood and make the viewer want to look at them. Finally Reflective meaning that the reasons behind why we buy things.

I think these theories can help my book covers by trying to keep in mind what will draw the viewer in and what will have the most effect on them in order to buy the book by the cover.