Publication Interim Crit

On Friday we had an interim crit for our three publication designs.

From the crit, I decided that I'm going to take my design for my uncomfortable images publication as I thought it was the strongest out of the three that I presented and it was also the publication which I thought was the more interesting and the one that I liked the most from my own designs. My peers in the crit also agreed that I should take this publication further.

In the crit, my first two publications didn't really get much feedback however, people have said how the third publication was interesting and is on an interesting topic to do. Having the images saturate the whole publication was also a good idea. However, though the images are nice they should be put in a certain order as only putting the images anywhere won't really bring out the message that is trying to be discussed in the publication. The publication should have some sort of order or narrative in order for it be much more effective and can take the readers on a journey as well as make them understand the whole purpose of the publication. In order to do this, I was suggested to have categories in the book or chapters which focus on certain parts of the crisis such as poverty, death or genocide etc. and use these topics in order to create a story with the images that I'm using. Also, in order to further emphasis the topic choosing colours and paper stock can also help as it can help with the structuring of the book in order to "force the reader to do what you want them to do". Furthermore, I was also suggested to cut down the use of collaged images but maybe use the actual images themselves as it can look too amateur-ish.

After, the criticism I decided to take on the suggestions I received and realised that maybe I should have a struture because looking back at my experiments the images were only put their without much consideration and as I was thinking if I'm going to do the final book, I need to give the publication a sense of beginning, middle and end or else it's just going to be a book full of pictures without having a story to it which defeats the whole purpose of what I'm trying to do; even with the articles I have to carefully manage the pagination in order for each page to relate to each other.

I'm thinking of using different paper stocks to go with certain topics e.g. poverty with brown rough ribbed paper and death with red paper. I will also use colour to highlight important pictures with I think have the biggest impact in order to demonstrate the topic that I'm trying to shed light on. I'm also thinking of having a kind of page or chapter information on the front of the publication much like a book to guide the readers on what the book contains as I think doing this may also help the readers understand the concept of the publication. In addition, I'm still going to make the book A6 and thick as I think it fits the aesthetic of the book and theme as well as making the production of it as cheap as possible but also if the publication is to be reproduced in the future it will be very fast and efficient.