3 Home reference manual Analog photography step-by-step manual Project report Cristiana Costin MA Information Design 2016–17 Tutors: Ruth Blacksell & Bryn Walls Department of Typography & Graphic Communication University of Reading 1 Home reference manual Contents Project brief 4 Discover Topic and audience 5 Reference reading 6 Bookshop visit 7 Styles of visual instructions 8 Transform Strategy approach 10 Structure and format 11 Book cover 14 Contents page 16 Chapter dividers 18 Reference spread 20 Process spread 22 Glossary spread 24 Make Production specifications 25 Typographic styles 26 Grid structure 27 Blad details 28 Conclusion 36 Project brief Background The home reference manual is a specific genre of books dedicated to the large audience, aims to be read and understood by a general group of people and is surrounded by practical topics such as DIY, cookery, health or physical activities. Most popular publishers in this domain are Dorling Kindersley and Reader’s Digest. Aims • To understand how text, photos and diagrams can work togeth- er to explain information in a heuristic way • To explore the possibilities offered by the double page spread • To understand the role and relationships of publishers, writers, packagers and designers in home reference publishing Deliverables A blad (book layout and design) consisting a minimum of four spreads, along with specifications about production and design style like typographic details and color scheme: • Cover • Contents page • Reference spread • Process spread Considerations • Design with the targeted user group in mind and develop the strategy based on the level of knowledge of the user and age group • Try to approach the layout like a double page spread, as a unit • Use multimodality throughout the book with the help of hierar- chy and interplay between verbal and visual language • Develop the overall structure of the book under the form of a flatplan, where the structure is clearly defined 4 Home reference manual Discover Aims • Understand the targeted user group • Identify different types of instructional manuals • Research on this specific type of editorial design Actions • Bookshop visit and material research • Investigate styles of instructional diagrams • Identify differences between reference and process spreads 5 Home reference manual Topic and audience Topic decision I decided to create a home reference manual about analog photog- raphy because it is a topic I have experience with and I could devel- op a process spread based on own observations which I find useful and wish to share with beginner photographers. When I started my research with a visit to the bookshop, I noticed that they had a couple of books related to photography but only one specifically on analog photography. Other popular techniques found online and in other bookshops are related to pinhole cameras and the well known digital photography. The lack of books on this topic made me more enthusiastic about this decision. Persona The structure of the book is based on a main user group. In order to develop an appropriate look and feel for the book, a persona profile was created and managed to define the overall strategy for the home reference manual. The persona was created based on own observations of different users in specific contexts. Also, my own experience with this type of photography helped me to gather faster insights after I made a list with the major difficulties I encountered during the whole process. Andrew, aged 17 • Lives in a flat with his girlfriend in London • Has a couple of cameras around the house but he never really developed a serious interest in shooting with them • Likes art, mixed-media and collages, experimental art in general • He recently attended an analog photography exhibition and was impressed with the creative work he saw there Objective: Start playing with analog photography and take photo- graphs with the cameras he already has at home. 6 Home reference manual Reference reading About the book genre Before starting to think about layout sketches and structure, we had to understand the genre of the home reference manual. Rob Waller held an Open University course that contains a text called How popular books are designed. This text is based on a series of interviews that Waller had with a publishing manager, an editor and a designer from Dorling Kindersley. I extracted some essential ideas that helped me develop my approach: • Illustrations and photographs should be carefully selected because the home reference manual is sold in several foreign markets and the meaning of certain elements might be disturb- ing for user groups that have different traditions. While photog- raphy always ensures accurate depictions, the illustrations help the user to understand the inner parts with the help of sections and see-through drawing techniques. • The cover is a very important part of the book. It has to be very attractive, to catch the eye of the user when they are browsing bookshelves and also, has to represent its contents. • The information contained in this kind of books is presented in flowcharts, where each chapter has a certain number of pages dedicated. The length of the chapters is decided before the content is selected. The content should fit the structure and not the other way around. About visual sequences A reading I found about instructions, called Making connections: and topic structures typography, layout and language, by Rob Waller was very useful to me when it came to structure the process spread and the overall hierarchy of the information. He presents in his thesis, The typo- graphic contribution to language. Towards a model of typographic genres and their underlying structures different strategies for presenting information in sequences and compares the views of authors like Nash and Halliday & Hasan (p. 156): • Step / Temporal • Stack / Additive • Star / Adversative • Chain / Causal 7 Home reference manual Bookshop visit Book analysis Analog photography is a topic which is becoming increasingly popular because of its vintage aspects. At the bookshop I paid attention to book sizes, the type of paper that was used along with details like position on the shelf and the impact of the spine compared to other books from the same shelf. Lomography is a website which sustains analog photography and occasionally publishes books about photography along with other publishing houses which have a more traditional look. The film photography handbook by Chris Marquardt and Monika Andrae Hardcover: 282 pages Publisher: Rocky Nook Dimensions: 8.2 × 0.7 × 10 inches Figure 1 Cover of the book Has a minimal contemporary look that uses color contrast and bold sans serif letters but does not reflect the interior of the book. I thought it is a colorful book that uses a lot of illustrations but has only black and white photography and a couple of tables and diagrams. Figures 2,3 Contents page and reference spread It has a traditional look and is very much based on symmetry and serif typeface. The book tries to combine images with text but I think the result is not very successful. Could use some color photography in order to attract the user that browses the book on the shelf. 8 Home reference manual Styles of visual instructions Illustration research In the previously-mentioned paper by Rob Waller, two books are being analysed by the author in terms of image and text combi- nations: The handbook of skiing and The handbook of swimming published by Knopf and written by Karl Gamma. I borrowed the handbooks from the library and studied the different techniques that are being used in order to differentiate between various types of information, spoken in different voices. Some illustrations are appropriate although some appear quite different, as if they are part of a separate book. I could also observe the types of sequences explained by Waller, such as stacks and chains. The handbook of skiing The whole book uses the colour blue throughout the chapters by Karl Gamma to highlight different elements of the page, although this makes the book more dull and boring. While there are many chapters, Paperback: 320 pages they are all treated in the same way and it is hard to differentiate Publisher: Knopf between levels of information because they are all represented in Dimensions: 1 × 6.8 × 9.2 inches the same tints of blue. Figure 4 Figure 5 Cover of the book Colourful illustra- Reference spread The layout makes use of borders and boxes to segment informa- tions that create dynamics on the page tion. However, the drawings use the same color even though the type of infor- but are not very helpful in establishing mation is different. The products presented in the image are not proportional in relation to each other. This makes me feel confused when I look at the items. what information you can find inside. 9 Home reference manual Figure 6 Reference and process pages There is a level of inconsistency in the illus- tration styles. Sometimes they are very geometric and axonometric, but other times they are very realistic. Moreover, the book sometimes combines pho- tography and drawings to illustrate a certain movement from different points of view. The use of a background color makes the black and white photos appear slightly more interesting. Analog photography Most of the instructional drawings related to photography make illustration styles use of technical drawings and section views. Some styles decide to show hands for more realism, some exclude them so that the user could focus on the objects shown in the diagram. Other styles, more contemporary, make us of photography. This type of techniques is like a collage illustration because arrows and other movement signals are shown digitally, on top of the photo. Figure 7 IKEA cardboard rechargable camera Image source: https://petapixel.