Though production of a book is part of the final resolution of the project in preparation for a guest group review with Victoria Forrest I decided to create a book dummy to mock-up the project would resolve in book form. The images in the exhibition are a mix of landscape and portraits of differing sizes and in my book dummy I wanted to convey this message to the reader as the different sizes are important to the overall narrative within the body of work. This potentially presented me with a number of layout challenges. The first being overall book format:
- Square book would provide balance between the landscape and portrait orientated images though all pages would contain an element of white space.
- Portrait layout would allow the portrait images to be printed larger giving them the same context as the exhibition context. However it would result in landscape images that would be significantly smaller than the portrait images plus they would also have over 50% of the page with white space.
- Landscape layout would allow the landscape images to take their appropriate place in the book context allowing them to be a full page bleed and where images are paired they could sit next to each other as a double page spread. However it would result in the portrait images being smaller than the landscape image which runs contra to the intended presentation of the work.
Based on this analysis it would suggest that book layouts do not provide a suitable solution. Though a custom approach to book construction might provide a suitable answer. When Mark Power worked with GOST Books in the creation of his book Mass they created a series of fold out pages that allowed the book to contain larger images than would normally bear possible in book format. Using this concept as a solution I decided to create a landscape book so that on first impression the reader would consider the book in the traditional sense of a book of landscape images. Then I would have the portrait images be fold out pages.
There are three possible orientations for the fold out pages. The first is the the fold line is at the top of the page so the bottom of the portrait and landscape images align. The second is to have the fold line at the bottom of the page so that the top of the images align. The third option was to have fold lines at the top and bottom which would centre the images however it represents the most complex method of construction. Based on positioning of images in the gallery layout I decided to place the fold so that images would fold downwards.
The final global decision to make in relation to the book was the method of construction as this will be a single book dummy it was decided that the portrait images would be inserted as second step in the construction process.
In preparation for the Group Critique with Victoria I created a draft layout in Indesign which was converted to a pdf for presentation purposes.
