News from Sunday, November 23, 2008 @ 9:33 AM, PSTIn this fifth post in our ongoing series on Creating DLa 23, we discuss the planning, layout and design of the 23rd edition of Dead Letter Art. In the past, layout consisted of cracking open a ready-made InDesign template, dropping in the processed images, and embellishing the design with a few text gradients, background fills, and decorative graphics. This time, however, the layout dimensions were completely different, there were nearly five times as many pages, and the entire issue was going to be printed in color.
Preliminary layout preparations included reading carefully the printing specifications and formatting guidelines given by Lulu.com, the online, on-demand book-printer that we had chosen for this issue. Configuring the master InDesign document for a professionally printed softcover-bound book requires considerably greater attention to detail. Involved in the layout calculations was everything from margins and gutters to crop marks and spine width. After several attempts at implementing the correct layout dimensions, the master template was finally ready for further design manipulation.
Designing the actual look and feel of the book was also challenging. In the past, we were liberated with the constraints placed upon us by working entirely in black and white (grayscale). With color now thrown into the mix, I found myself rather vexed by the infinite design possibilities. After several discussions with Thane and Ron, the aesthetic direction of this issue finally turned toward minimalism. With a much larger assortment of higher quality submissions than we had enjoyed with previous versions of DLa, we wanted to keep the emphasis on the content, focusing on the artwork, photography, and other creative works as much as possible. With such an excellent display of collective talent, we didn’t need to bury ourselves with extraneous design embellishments and other nonessential ingredients.
Moving forward with a minimalist design for the overall issue, there was still design work to be done within and between each featured section, article, and gallery. Given the diverse range of both subject matter and creative media, we found that the most logical way to organize and present the content was first by medium and then by artist. So, for example, the issue would feature several artwork and photography galleries, each subdivided into sections for each artist/photographer. And, as the majority of issue content consisted of digital photography, we decided to divide the photo galleries into three parts, appearing near the beginning, middle, and end of the book.
So, as this layout strategy began to emerge, the other sections of the book began falling into place. Individual media sections were united with a similar aesthetic theme, while more distinct, independent content regions (Jay Prior interview, ArtSpace, Artopsy, Tim Betz story, etc.) were tucked in between the primary media galleries. We then fleshed out this logical structure with the usual biscuits: the werdz page, table of contents, intro page, a couple of splash pages, Il Commentator, and so on. Finally, after several weeks of feverish design wrangling and layout wrestling, the visual and organizational framework of the entire book was complete and ready to be populated with all of that carefully prepared content. In other words, it was time for the real work to begin: assembling the content, formatting the text, and embellishing the details!
Next in the Creating DLa 23 series: “Part 6: Putting it All Together”
Perishable
[ Edited on: 03/16/09 ] | [ 0 ]
Leave a Comment »
[
FullScreen |
LetterBox ]
Somebody say something!
RSS Feed | TrackBack URI | XHTML Tags