Studio Brief 3 - Production Considerations (a few)

The printing consideration below are the only ones which I didn't feel I cover in depth enough.




Printing techniques - signatures, gutter, margins

As I was staple binding my book, I needed the pages to be set up in multiples of 4 due to the book using signatures. Other methods of binding will need different page set ups. For example, concertina bind doesn't need any signatures. As my set up was very basic, the margins and gutters of the book didn't need to be tampered with. However, it was important to consider the margin near the page fold. Sometimes the margin closest to the fold in the page needs to be made bigger so any text or non-bleed images are obstructed when the page folds, this can be shown the most on a Japanese stab stitch bind. The gutters wouldn't need to be changed for a staple bind but for layout purposed then the gutters may need to be adjusted to allow for the text to be more visible if the book is off a smaller scale.

Mockups

Mock ups are important when designing a book. It's completely different to see a book digitally then seeing it printed out and in a physical form. When looking at your book in Indesign it may look perfect, the text may look big enough and the images high quality enough but once printed then you can really notice how aspects of the book look. When it came to my book, I decided to scrap one idea and to start again and this was because when I printed out a mock up everything looked different, the size of the images was blown up and the text wasn't how I imagined it to be and from that I started again.

It also gave me the perfect opportunity the test the mock ups on my target audience. Gathering their thoughts and opinions on the mock up, see what they like an what they don't. With feedback like that I could adapt there opinions to make the books concept more strong and effective then it was before.

Pagination

I didn't use pagination in my book and this was because my book was a small publication, which didn't have enough pages in it that i thought a pagination would be effective to add in. Also through my research I noticed that the publication similar to my own also didn't use pagination, so that was big factor into me not using one.

However, there are a lot of times where you should use a pagination. When you have a lot of pages and a lot of information it can sometimes help to use a pagination to structure your book and to let your audience know where they are in the book as they might become confused as to where they are and what sections of the book they are looking at, so a contents page can solve that problem.