Print - design experimentation

I have decided not to drill a hole in the middle of my book as I think the hole would take away from the content of the book. The purpose of the book is to guide readers on how to look after and maintain their vinyl records - if the book was purely photographic, or for show, the hole may be appropriate as it would not cut through any important content. I also considered the audience with this - an older audience may not appreciate the hole in the book and would just want to read the content.

Experimenting with text and photo placement has given me a systematic method to approach designing my publication. Knowing that - because of the perfect binding method I will be using - the inside of each page will be stuck together needing me to allow a gutter, the best placement of the text will be on the other side of the page. 

Typesetting
A lot of publications set text into manuscript form. However setting text in this way makes the text in my publication look long and overwhelming, and people are less likely to want to read it. Setting the text into paragraphs instead breaks up the text and makes the text seem more appealing to read. 

As well as creating columns for the text, I decided to justify it with the last line to the left. This makes the columns appear cleaner and the overall look of the page more polished and put together.

I wanted the aesthetic of this book to be very clean and minimalistic, focusing on just the given content. Some of the photos given are of really good quality and composition so the pictures will be the main feature with the text alongside. I began to start experimenting with photo placement, using this yellow record photo as an example.

I explored having more than one photograph for each section - arranging them gallery style. However after considering the limited content I have to work with, I came to the conclusion I did not have enough photos for this to be a running theme. As well as this I did not like the negative space on the page. The photos looked a little lost and out of place.

In these experiments the picture is the primary focus with it overlapping the page. Here I had an opportunity to play with the placement of the text, Placing the text next to the photo looked effective as the negative space created added to the impact of the photograph - however disregards my earlier decision to place text on the outside of the pages so as to not lose any content when binding. Placing the text in boxes of corresponding colours broke up the page too much and made the text less legible.

Expanding the picture to fit the entire double page spread worked really well but I struggled with fitting the text onto the page. The first experiment with the text overlaid on top of the photo looked clean but I thought as the audience will be a bit older it may be slightly difficult to read, not necessarily on this picture but when applied to other pages as not all pictures are as bright or light as this one. 

Taking a successful element from earlier experimentation, I again made the photo span over 1 page, however this time there is no border around it. I think the most successful version was the most simple as it left the focus on the picture and the text is easy to read.