Print - design development

In the crit I was given helpful feedback which I can apply to my designs to improve them. I have chosen a few suggestions which I feel I could easily adjust.

- Scrap the lines and make big titles using the colours from the records. 

- overlap text and image
– colour pairing could be more obvious, could experiment with coloured text 
- experiment with larger and smaller text, smaller would utilise the white space and put more focus on the record itself. 

Experimenting with the text on the page as per the feedback I received in the crit lead me to remove the lines I had added and instead include a title. The small titles (above) worked better with the layout of the text and image but still left a lot of negative space that I thought could be filled better with a bigger title. This lead to these developments (below). Placing the title at the top of the page made it look out of place, but having it just above the body text left negative space at the top of the page which worked in contrast with the big title. 

The title also overlaps the photo due to its size, which conjoins the elements on the page instead of having them completely separate. This makes the pages flow better together. I like this style and will apply this to all pages. 

With the maintenance section of the book, containing the tips to look after the users records, the title 'maintenance' is too long and I couldn't apply the same look to the page using this word. Making it smaller would look odd as all other pages will have the large title, and breaking up the word into 2 lines would also appear out of place.

To counteract this problem, I decided to use the word 'care' instead, which is a much shorter word and I can carry on the theme without compromising the content of the book.

The photographic content of this book was the biggest struggle for me. As mentioned earlier in my imagery post I struggled to get a consistent look to the pages due to the different lighting in the photos. With the above pages, I was able to remove the background completely so the pages seemed as if they were a record coming out of the sleeve which looked effective. However when I tried to apply the same style to the photo below, the overall look of the page was odd and the equipment looked out of place on a white background. I consequently abandoned this idea.

Utilising the feedback and using my developments I have created a plan for my pages. (I have created this primary version of my book in Illustrator as opposed to InDesign as I am able to see the double page spreads easily. When creating my final publication for print I will create in InDesign.)

I am happier with the overall plan and aesthetic for my publication but am still unsure of a few elements. A few photos and pages may be tweaked before I create my final pages for print, for example the first page and the photo on the 17th and 18th pages could be further improved upon.