What is a (dog) book?

This is a bit of a catch up post about some of the secondary research I looked at during the making of my 100 dogs book.

First up a couple of links I found really useful for the information I needed.

The Kennel Club UK , lots of breed statistics

Patterdale terriers info, very useful and interesting reading about a non kennel club breed local to me in Cumbria

And now a couple of links to some of the more extreme dog books I found.

Knitting with dog hair (yes really)

and my personal favorite,

LE CORBUSIER BINDS BOOK IN DEAD PET DOG!

Module OUGD102 Self Evaluation.

What practical skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?

The main practical skill I have learnt is how to use InDesign. I have enjoyed working with this program and feel the skills I have learnt will serve me well in the future. I have also greatly improved on my Photoshop skills and I think I am now quite good at enhancing photographs ready for print and I have done this over 100 times for this module alone! I have also developed a good understanding of how to best convert colour photographs to black and white by manipulating the separate colour channels and adjusting shadows, highlights and mid-tone contrast. Again skills that I enjoyed learning and I will will serve me well.

The other main skill I have improved on is researching and categorizing research, for this project I feel I handled quite a large body of research in an effective way by keeping things well ordered right from the start.

What approaches to methods of problem solving have you developed and how have they informed your design development process?

The what if brief was very good for developing problem solving and I feel I have applied many of these techniques for my final 100 book brief, It helped my focus my research and have a more targeted and better categorized outcome.

What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?

This module has confirmed for me that one of my main strenghs (and enjoyment) is in using photography. I am also usually more pleased with the results of my photography than any of my other work. I do want to develop other skills but I feel I want to be incorporating photography into my work where I can.

What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these more fully?

I still feel I don't always experiment enough in my work, and I find this hardest when under pressure to complete to a deadline, nearly all the time! I am not sure if I can address this but it is something I am now aware of in my work.

Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?

1)Be more realistic about the amount of work that can be effectively completed in the time period.

2)Try to experiment more with the outcome rather than use an obvious solution, (not easy!)

3)I wont try to plan, design, layout and bind a 120 page book in 2 weeks ever again! It didn't all get done despite long, long days. Enhancing so many photos was the biggest mistake here, 10-20mins per photo soon added up when I had 100 to get through.

4)I feel I got the research aspect of this brief about right but I didn't do enough actual designing for the end result, this was partly the focus for the module I think but I still feel the final result could have been better, again this was a time issue.

5)Try not to get distracted when I should be working, the larger the workload the less I feel inclined to get going! Very worrying and doesn't bode well unless I can tackle this and stay focused and positive about the work.

Are there any things we could have done differently that would have benefitted your progress?

Some of the days I felt I was hanging around waiting for crits rather than working, it would have been nice to know the crit times the day before so I could plan days more effectively. This was also more painful because I didnt feel I got effective feedback from crits until the final one on the day before submission when it was too late to change anything, very frustrating.

How would you grade yourself on the following areas:

(5=excellent, 1=poor)
Attendance: 5
Punctuality: 5
Motivation: 4
Commitment: 3
Quantity of work produced: 4
Quality of work produced: 4 for the photos, 2 for actual design
Contribution to the group: 4

Dogs in colour?

I have been experimenting with using selective desaturation on my dog photographs. I found that as my photos were taken at different times and with different cameras they lacked consistancy when printed and viewed together. Converting to black and white seemed to improve this a great deal but I felt it was a shame to discard all the colour as some of the pics definitely do not look as good in b&w. The solution I have been experimenting with is only using colour to highlight the dogs themselves and leaving the backgrounds b&w. This is a manual process in photoshop so it will take quite a long time to do all the 100 dogs (8 hours if it takes 5 mins per photo, some will take much longer!!) so want to be very sure this is the best way to present the photographs before I edit them all, decisions, decisions...

(two examples)

Dog Book Update

This is progressing along a little slower than I would have liked but I still have two weeks left on the brief.

The pics of the 100 dogs I photographed are best viewed over on my facebook albums: click and clicky. I have lots of good information on each of these dogs and I have decided to use this as the foundation of the book.

The plan now is to combine secondary research about dogs in general, and contrast that to my sample of 100 dogs. I will categorise the dogs in many different ways, either arranged into chapters (breeds, ages, colours and names of the dogs etc), or find a way for the data to flow through the book. Using full bleed photos in a landscape format seemed to be effective (well received in the crit sessions) but I will decide the final format after I have settled on the way the content will work.

What is a book?

Well put simply, a book is (usually) an object based around pages being bound together.

But that says little about the creativity that can be achieved, here are a few that opened my eyes to the more extreme possibilities in book design and construction.

'Rainbow In Your Hand' by Masashi Kawamura. A deliciously simple idea!


AtoZ in 3D. I actually first came across this in the college library, It was a total surprise and I was transfixed for about 10 mins muttering 'wow'. An amazing piece of paper engineering, god knows how they managed to mass-produce this!





Chris Van Diemen's online portfolio is well worth a look. He is a Dutch designer who has dome some really nice experimental book designs.
http://www.chrisvandiemen.com/






Noriko Ambe is a Japanese artist who has done some amazing work by intricately cutting existing books



http://www.norikoambe.com/works/2008w0002p01.html
http://www.norikoambe.com/works/2008w0002p02.html

Book of 100 Dogs - Statement of intent

The title on focus of my work in response to this brief will be Dogs.

For my research I intend to investigate primary photography, interview responses and illustration. I also intend to collect secondary facts and statistics from book on the subject of dogs and internet sites. I have already collected photographs of 100 dogs together with information about each dog gained from an interview with the owner. The responses I have are both quantitative (dog age etc.) and qualitative (I asked each owner to describe their dogs personality) I would like to use some of these photographs in my final resolution somehow, but not all are of a quality I am satisfied with so I intend to see how I can use some as a starting point for illustration or typographic work. At this point I am thinking of creating a high quality book of dog based design work, a sort of coffee table book for people why appreciate both dogs and graphic design to dip into.

As mentioned, I would like to use some illustration work and typographic work in this book. Illustration is a skill I am quite weak in so I would like to develop my skills. I would aim to use my primary photography as a basis for the illustration, using illustrator and photoshop to experiment and explore ideas. As I get into this project I think the design outcome will become more focused and clearer, but I don't want to dismiss many ideas at this point, other than I don't want to make a typical boring 'book of dog breeds, facts and figures' or a children's book full of cuddly pets, that just isn't my thing. I think trying typographic work based on dogs will either turn out awful or brilliant. I will be interested to see which! I am also interested to see how I can desplay statistics in a visualy ingaging way.

To evaluate this work I would like to make use of crits in college and also people out of college to help me gauge the success of my work, I also know that friends who helped me by finding dogs for me to photograph over xmas will be interested in the progress of this project so I can make use of them as well. I plan to use a sketchbook for rough ideas as well as ongoing development and evaluation.

What If...?

This is a self evaluation for the 'What If...?' group project.

The problem we identified was that people in Leeds are afraid of being out at night in the dark. The evidence we found to support this was based on the results of questionnaires and also looking at statistics related to crimes and looking at publications offering advice for people avoiding crime in Leeds.

To categorise the research the group did, the surveys we carried out were Primary research and the statistics we found were secondary. We also created primary research in the form of photographing potential crime sites and also we counted locations that we could used for our final resolution (potential sticker places). We used secondary research to focus our message to target students, we found they are much more likely to be the victims of assaults and robbery at night, and we also found research that helped us to target the area for our campaign: the A660 corridor has been highlighted as the main area these sorts of crimes happen against students.

The purely statistical numbers based research (for example we asked students to vote on our developmental work to gauge which final resolution would get our message across best) could be considered Quantitative research. The opinion driven research we did (for example we asked people what exactly they felt threatened by at night) would be categorized as Qualitative.

All these methods we used were useful for this project, even though some of our results could have been predicted I felt much more confident about our resolution knowing for sure we were on the right track, and I had the figures in front of me to prove it. The qualitative research is always interesting because asking open questions to people often results in surprising answers that can take the project in a different direction to one that quantitative figures alone would have resulted in. The research really did dictate the both the concept and also the design work of this project. It became clear from asking opinions on our developmental work, the clear common sense message with simple graphics would engage with our target audience better than the other test resolutions. I was very happy to go along with these results.

I don't think we found any of these methods particularly problematic, but it was hard to know what point to stop doing more research and focus on the resolution, in the end I feel we got the balance about right with a great body of research and an effective sticker as our resolution. I think if I wasn't in a group with others, I would have been worried about the amount of time spent on researching and would have started designing sooner. I now feel doing this wouldn't have resulted in a better resolution so I have learnt about the use of research and time management as a result of this brief.

It is hard to categorise five things that we could have done different, but for me the main issue was that I missed the briefing and start of this project due to illness. This is never ideal but in this project in particular I found it hard to get up to speed and contribute to the group effort, as so much work had been already done before I rejoined the team. In the end I think we pulled together well and it was great to see a wide variety of work from each member of the team coming together and helping our final resolution.

Five things I have learnt about the design process in the last two weeks.
1) research is vital
2) it doesn't matter if you don't know the resolution to a brief half way through the time you have to complete
3) I should spend more of my time on research in the future
4) research can often make decisions easier as you have the proof that one way of doing something will work/is more popular/will be better targeted at the audience.
5) when you get stuck, doing qualitative primary research could be a good way to get fresh ideas and get going again.

Some images from the group work (click to enlarge)

The final sticker, simple and effective, targeted at students walking along the A660 corridor.
This was a board we put together to show just some of our research and alternative design resolutions
The final resolution in action (thanks to David for thegreat photo) next to some of the more important bits of research we used to create it, with the referances to where they all came from.

Fresh off the printer, would make for cool wallpaper I think...

100 project

100 photographs taken as the start of my new module on the course. The brief for these was so wide we could really take photographs of anything that interested us. These are some of my best ones. Click on photos to enlarge.


Xmas shoppers in the city centre, I didnt really rate this picture highly myself but two people independently have told me they really love it.
This is a nice bit of sculpture outside an office in Leeds city centre, Looking up through it made for a couple of interesting shots I feel

I am puzzled and slightly fascinated by the bizarre architecture in the Leeds Uni campus.

This was one of a few 'reflection' photos I took, more on them in a future blog entry.
Hyde Park, Leeds. Someone had painted his boots red, which combined with his already slightly camp pose gives this statue quite a sureal look now.
The top of my street, its quite souless really, but I liked seeing the shiney new building behind the messy old brick takeaways here. You can actualy smell kebab from the spot this was taken
Waiting fror the train to take us to manchester, The light was amazing but my compact camera struggled to capture what I wanted from it. I must get an SLR, but anyway this was the best it could do shooting into the sun and its still an interesting pic.