Layout Refining (and messing around)

After taking a bit of a break from looking at my photobook layout, I suddenly felt inspired to play with it again. Coming at it with fresh eyes, I can easily see that it needs a lot of work. I think the content is working, but the flow of the book, as well as the way the elements are arranged on the page needs work. I want to make it look less amateur. I also want to include a lot more negative space in the book- so that not every page has a facing picture. I want a lot more single pages, but I would like to include a few pages that have a facing image too.

Additionally, I am no longer going to hand stitch small images and flaps into the book using red string, as I’ve been advised to drop that element. I think I would still like to bind the book with red string, but I think it will play a much more subtle role in the overall publication. 

This meant that I had to re-work quite a few pages in the book, which I had planned to stitch text messages over the top of. However, once I separated the full page images and the text, I think it looked a lot better. Below are some examples of this. I’ve also decided to keep all of the text messages in black and white, since it is more consistent and also it’s not so important to include the red anymore, as the red string is not going to be such a key metaphor.

I also thought about how I could make the glitch pages a bit rougher, so I tried shifting the pixels on a couple of rows across a bit to add a ‘glitchy’ looking row. I don’t mind it, but I think it needs a bit more experimentation.

AND, I think I finally worked out how I am going to include the coffee cups! I liked these from the start, but as the project grew they became less and less relevant, and I thought I might have to cut them out completely. But I had an idea today to use them as yet another time marker- but a subtle one. In a similar way to how I ended up splitting Shinya’s photos of Esaka up as signature markers, I plan to scatter the coffee cups throughout the book, rather than have them all on one page. As an ambiguous nod to COVID, I’ve also handwritten numbers underneath them. Those numbers represent the number of new COVID cases in Australia and Japan on the first day of each month. Because there is no explanation or hint as to what the numbers mean, I think it will invite viewers to imagine what they might represent and try to draw their own conclusions.