Reflection

To create my layout I started by choosing my photos. I found that a lot of them looked very incohesive together as they had very different lighting. I ended up choosing 4 photos that were all in the day time as I would then be able to make these look like a collection together. I also liked that the 4 photos were all different in terms of composition. I started by just placing these photos onto pages in InDesign. The white background made the photos themselves stand out but made the booklet as a whole rather boring, so then I played around with different blocks of colour to try to make it more interesting. This again felt a little too basic so I decided to try to incorporate the motif of the chair throughout the background as well. For the front and back page I had taken photos of a doll's chair on a white background, so I used this photo to create different patterns in the back. I ended up really liking this. I chose a dark grey for the colour of the chair in the back, which I quite liked. To create the chair graphic (which I then used for the front and back page design), I took photos of a dolls chair I owned with a white background, and then removed the background in photoshop. This wasn't the best method as it ended up not having the smoothest of edges. If I had more time I would outline the shape as a vector graphic in illustrator, but due to time constraints I just left it for this project as on the scale I was going to print it, it wasn't very noticeable.

The next day I printed my booklet and took it for a group crit. Overall I think people liked the chair graphic in the background especially the one with it on its side as it was a little weird and abstract. However, we ended up deciding it would be best for the chair to be in the same blue colour as the rest of the document as the dark grey was too distracting. People also thought I didn't really have enough content inside the booklet as I only chose to display 4 photos and didn't have any on the covers. I really agree with this and ideally would have used more. If I had time to reshoot I would use the other chairs I tried (office chair and handmade chair) and take more photos of them with similar lighting to the other images so I could include them as well. They really liked the back cover but thought that the front cover wasn't weird enough as the chair doesn't look out of place there. To improve this I could use another weird position of the chair where it isn't completing standing to make it link more with the theme of the whole photoshoot.

After the crit I went and made some quick changes to the layout following on from the constructive criticism. I reedited a couple of the photos so the blues in the sky were more of a similar hue to both each other and the blue I used in the background. I think this helped a lot in making the whole booklet seem more cohesive.

4- Layout + Crit

Confirm copying