OUGD504 | STUDIO BRIEF 3 | PRIMARY RESEARCH

To start off this brief, I decided to go to The Village Bookshop in Leeds Corn Exchange to gain some primary research. They have a wide range of photography books, which is definitely going to be useful in this project.

I was originally drawn to this book because of the bold orange colour and contrasting black and white stripes. The orange paper was actually a sleeve, and when you take it off it reveals another design which messes with your eyes. I find this a really cool idea and I think I'd possibly like to use a sleeve in my design, although I don't really have a clear aesthetic at the moment.

I really liked the feel of this book, and the perfect bound finish made it very professional. I think if I had enough content, I'd like to create a professional looking perfect bound book, although it depends on how I layout my pages and paginate my book. I think I'd like to create something similar to this size, A5 seems like a good size to me as it's not overly big and it's easy to hold in the hand.

This cover caught my eye because of its simplicity. It doesn't even spell out a word, but to me it looks like it should say "super". I think sometimes, simplistic covers work better than something over-complicated and busy.

I really liked the printing method used on this cover. They used a dark grey stock and printed using black ink, which I think is really effective. It's quite subtle and makes use of creative printing methods which is something I also need to consider. 

I liked this simple cover too, and I found the layout inside interesting. I liked how it sometimes would have a full bleed image on one side, and break it up with a lot of white space on the other. I especially like how it starts on the bottom of the page, but doesn't go all of the way to the top. I need to consider how I'll layout my book, and if I'm going to have more than one image on each spread.

These two spreads both contain one image, but one is full bleed and one has a white border. I think the full bleed image is more effective, because there's no distractions. It immerses you in the image and makes you want to look more closely. The image with the border doesn't really grab my attention as much, especially as its quite a dark image. 

Finally, this book uses two images on one spread, and doesn't have full bleed imagery. I like this layout better than having one image without full bleed. The white space is larger, and draws your attention to the images rather than away.