Book about books
RESEARCH
- a medium for recording information in the from of text and images, typically composed of many pages
ancient times
- religious purpose only
nowadays
- entertainment
- religious purposes
- education
what are the functions of a book?
- provide reader information and new facts
--> educate people, provide them knowledge
- provide vibrant and descriptive vocabulary
- for audience to enjoy and be entertained by words on the page
--> entertaining typefaces?
- sometimes hierarchical structures can enhance the feeling that the content gives off
- with scientific proof, when people read, their minds and emotions take over their bodies
--> hierarchy is really important to control their minds and feelings
book elements
- images
- text
- titles
- page numbers
- footnote
- cover
- body pages
- hierarchy (designers' part when making book)
Hierarchy in books
- the arrangement or presentation of elements in a way that implies importance
- influences the order in which the human eye perceives what it sees
- human brain has innate organizing tendencies that “structure individual elements, shapes or forms into a coherent, organized whole.”
- When an element in a visual field disconnects from the ‘whole’ created by the brain's perceptual organization, it “stands out” to the viewer
--> highlighting importance
- color, size, alignment, and character.
what do they specifically do?
1. reading patterns
- from the top down and most cultures read from left to right.
- Recent studies have shown that people first scan a page to get a sense of whether they are interested, before committing to read it.
- Scanning patterns tend to take one of two shapes, “F” and “Z
f-patterns
- apply to traditional, text-heavy pages like articles or blog posts
- readers scan down the left side of the page, they look for keywords in left-aligned headings or initial topic sentences, then stop reading when they come to something interesting
- results look like an F
z-patterns
- apply to other sorts of pages, like ads or websites (block paragraphs)
- first scan across the top of the page, then shoots down to the opposite corner at a diagonal and does the same thing across the lower part of the page
2. size matters
- people read bigger things first
- this tendency is strong enough to override the top-down rule
3. space and texture
- give content ample room to breathe to draw attention
- substantial negative space left around an element --> more readily visible to readers
= overall arrangement or pattern of space, text and other detail on a page
- balance in positive and negative space
What if there is NO visual hierarchy?!
cause confusion
- readers take in all info at the same level of importance
- make audience confused and not able to digest much or any information
- they bounce round all of the "parts" without ever getting the "whole"
After doing research and reading articles about books, I realised the importance of hierarchy in books and that without hierarchal structures, a book would be useless, and will not even be considered as a book. I thought that it would be really interesting to talk about the relationship between hierarchy and content, designers and writers. Both of them has to work together to create a book that is "real". Therefore, I decided to produce a zine based on the idea of the importance of hierarchy by using simple InDesign elements, text boxes, image boxes and of course, the most important elements on a book, text and images.
concepts
- without content, hierarchy is nothing
- without layout, content is nothing
MY INITIAL ATTEMPT
Books are bounded pages with contents that are well designed and placed under a set layout. This book is showing the importance of the hierarchy of content and that a book will only work and be legible to readers only when words and images are placed under a hierarchal structure. Conversely, when only text and image boxes are placed in a page without any content, it will not be a "book".
I then sent the file to Han and she did some changes and tried to enhance and decorate the pages. She added images and made the words into different sizes. This is to show how messy it would look lie without any layouts in a book. Han's idea was a bit different from my initial one, emphasising on how a book would not be looking like a book when there are only text boxes. However, turned out that her outcome looks quite interesting and is actually really hard to read too.
FINAL OUTCOME
printed the zine out and I really like the outcome as the messiness and randomness of how text and images are placed without any designed layouts look really nice together.
Due to personal issues, we did the project separately in our homes. This definitely affected our communication as we only texted through messages.
