My book for this project consists of a collection of Korean poems translated to English. I have noticed when collecting the poems and arranging them, that Korean poetry describes nature and seasons. When trying to brainstorm for ideas, I have changed my plans a couple of times (as you can notice in my previous process posts). When looking for inspiration, I had to read about Korean traditional/modern art, festivals and famous locations.
When doing my project, I had a very hard time brainstorming for ideas and finding inspiration for the designs. Looking at photos of Korea and reading more about the culture helped a lot (although the designs are not very Korean styled).
When I was designing my book, there were some objects/backgrounds that I wanted in specific pages, and it was hard to copy and paste them and have them in the exact same position as the other pages. After searching, I decided to use the master pages, which worked when I did the backgrounds, but then when I tried to add the buttons, they did not appear because they were behind the objects on my pages. I had to search again, and I tried another trick, which is creating a page and add the button in a layer that is above the objects. AND IT WORKED!
The hardest part of this project was printing. I had to spend and hour and a half in the printing shop trying to change my PDF files to print properly with the pages in the right order. Which resulted in mistakes I didn’t noticed by the end because I was EXHAUSTED! By the end, I was just glad it printed the pages in the right order.
Looking at the outcome, I have to say I am a little satisfied (never fully satisfied). I know there are parts that I could fix, but I am glad I’m done on time.
I really love how in this project I used photos that were photographed/designed/drawn & scanned by me. This makes the project more special and interesting to me.
Here are photos of the final results:
Now that I am done with my project, I realized that I have had horrible time management and I got busy and distracted by other courses which made me get really stressed out by the end. Overall, this was a very interesting project and experience and I really hope I get to design more books in the future with proper time management and brainstorming. I am still a little sad because of the little mistakes in the designs and printing, but I am glad it actually looks acceptable.. or a little good?
– Maryam
Pexolated 