Print
2019
Individual Project

About the Project

This project was an assignment for a course on Communications Design Fundamentals at Carnegie Mellon University. I was tasked to create a book with at least 8 spreads.

Ideas

Early-on, I knew I wanted to create something I could use. I teach technology, so I first wanted to create a book on technology, but then decided that paper isn’t a meaningful way of teaching technology (at least in the ways that I do it). As such, I explored the settings during which paper would make sense. After some thought and exploration, I decided that a bar is that spot. At that point, I knew that I wanted to make a recipe book for alcoholic drink recipes.

Now that I had my concept, I began thinking of concepts. I thought about different types of bars: home bars, restaurants, etc. I also thought about how people interact with alcohol and the times during which they would use a book like this. This led to some concepts such as a book that is incorporated into a drink shaker, a book that could be looped into a bar stool, and even a book that could double as posters. Eventually, I decided on a more modern and explorative concept.

Years ago, people would program computers using punch-cards and I wanted to create a similar experience for alcoholic drinks. I imagined a machine that would take in a slip of paper, read the punch card, and automatically pour the correct proportions for the drink. My book would be a book of these punch-cards.

Final Compositions

Each punch-card has two sides. The front side displays the information for the drink’s recipe and the back side shows a graphic that relates to the drink.

For the front and back covers, I wanted to create something that added to the home-bar aesthetic, which let to me thinking of laser-cut wood. For the binding, I wanted to make sure that it was variable — people should be able to add and remove pages at their will. This led me to adding two wooden covers, both laser-cut, tied together with a leather thread.

Project 5 — Grids, Style and Format was originally published in CDF S19 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For project 5 we are making our own booklet. I initially had a couple ideas including a book of indie video games and a pocket Emily Dickinson poetry with my illustrations. I ended up making a Dylan lyric book with consideration of coherence in color scheme as well as the general art theme. Bob Dylan’s prolific career provided us with numerous photos that are not just aesthetically beautiful but also historically significant. And for the most part, these photos are Black & White, excellent for my purposes.

I had some idea of the songs and photos I want to include. I did some more research into the length of the songs, but still ended up keeping a really long song “Hurricane” because it had a photo directly related to it, and I really liked it. I ultimately chose 6 songs out of the list below.

Iterations before Interim Crit

I tried many things with the background of the text as I thought It might be too bland to go all white, but ultimately stuck to white.

I tried using the specific blue color often found in Bob Dylan album art and posters. But that did not work for lyric highlights, so I used a bright orange, also a familiar color to Dylan-related art, instead.

Final Version

With the feedback I got I decided to change color scheme into a more coherent B&W with orange highlights only.

I centered the shorter lyrics instead of pushing them to the top left.

I also shifted the locations of the photos on the individual pages. Instead of having all of them centered, they now take up more dynamic spaces according to the structure & light directions within the photo.

Under Suzanne’s suggestion I did an orange overlay for the album covers page to make the color scheme obvious.

P5 Bob Dylan Lyric Book was originally published in CDF S19 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Right before we were introduced to Project 5, I had finished shooting photos for Spirit Fashion Show. As a creative lead, I was responsible for headshots, promo “diary entries”, and shooting the show. After realizing that we only put together a pamphlet for attendees, I thought it might be a good idea to create a lookbook with the photos I had just taken!

Sketches

Before adding in content, I created a simple layout for the front, back, and body pages. For the body pages, I created multiple options with variations of vertical and horizontal photos.

I quickly realized that my layout didn’t give the photos enough attention, so I made them larger shortened the margins.

Digital Iteration

The following images are the front, back, and an example body page from my first digital iteration. I started with an all-black theme and chose images from my favorite 5 lines from the show. At first, each body page had the same arrangement with a full-length vertical shot on the left side and one horizontal shot on the right.

Interim Crit

During the interim crit, I received very useful advice. It was suggested that I add variation to the layout, make the images larger, change the fonts, add info about the designers, experiment with background color, and bring more attention to the photos rather than the text. I was also given sample lookbooks from Suzanne that had very appealing layouts.

Final Book

After incorporating nearly all of the feedback from the interim crit, I settled on my final layout:

Conclusion

Overall, I am very satisfied with my final book. I enjoyed creating something with my own, original content, especially since it’s something I can share with the Spirit Fashion Show team. I received very positive feedback from my peers and feel more comfortable using yet another design tool.

Project 5 was originally published in CDF S19 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Booklet
2019
Individual Project

About the Project

The project was a booklet on quotes that may come off as hurtful in different ways, assigned as the final project in the Communication Design Fundamentals class, taught by Suzanne Choi. The goal of the project to make typography and grid system decisions in practice to augment the content on the pages, as well as to use color and visual elements cohesively with textual elements of the book. The book was required to have been printed and bound, with at least 16 pages.

Project Process

The idea for the book was to have a series of spreads covering a variety of hurtful quotes that follow different themes, as well as having photos or infographics that illustrates the theme from a different angle. The purpose of the book was to show, not tell, and as such there is minimal textual description or explanation, and the goal is for the reader to gain an understanding of the problem from the quotes and graphics themselves.

Initially, as shown in the above sketches, I considered having a variety of layouts, including photos that appeared on different parts of the 3x3 grid, as well as content that spans the 2 pages of a spread. However, I elected to adopt a simpler design with each spread containing a full-page photo/graphic opposing a page with a theme and number of quotes related to the theme. I chose to use a relatively classical font (Adobe Caslon Pro) to suit the solemn nature of the quotes on the pages.

Before the interim crit, I was unsure of how to organize the quotes in a way that is visually appealing, but also disorganized to illustrate the nature of the quotes. As such, to request feedback, I had some pages that were organized with a line below each quote, and some that weren’t (below). I also had a mostly white color scheme, but with some darker photos. I received feedback that the underlines helped partition the pages and establish hierarchy. I also received feedback that a unified dark color scheme would benefit the consistency and aesthetic of the project, which was supposed to be more serious and sad. There were also some problems with margins not being correctly used or inconsistent, which I fixed.

For the final version, I adopted the dark color scheme by having a background colors and inverting the colors as necessary. and I finally settled on having four colors for the lines and titles (green, blue, white, dark red) represent the four themes covered in the book, but still having all of the text be white. I made the design decision to use subtle colors to carve out the 3x3 row grid, and have them be represented in a small 2x2 square pattern on the cover. I believe that this hinting with colors, as well as the horizontal lines, tie the themes and the book together without having the primary colors distract from the nature of the quotes.

Project 5 was originally published in CDF S19 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In this final project I designed a book with 8 spreads (16 pages), focusing on grid, color, and font choices to put together a well thought-out book design.

Ideation

I had a lot of trouble coming up with the idea for the book. I wanted to choose something that I loved, which was travel. I went to the American Southwest on vacation when I was rather young and I remember being fascinated that 1. there was such an expanse of red rock for hundreds of miles, 2. there were so many shapes that nature had carved into the rock through billions of years and 3. all of this was underwater at some point. So I wanted to make a book that highlighted the best types of rock that I saw on the trip to share with people who may be interested in visiting the region, so that they have a little guidebook that isn’t very conventional as it has some out-of-the-way places and recommendations.

I decided not to include Grand Canyon because it is rather cliché and most people have heard of it to some extent. I wanted to show that there are so many other places to visit in the Southwest beyond the stereotype.

Initial Format

I initially wanted to make a guidebook with very big pictures to display the geological features of the region. My initial sketches show very large pictures and very little text, something I generally stuck with throughout the process. I thought that the pictures of the rocks could explain what the rocks looked like better than a long paragraph of me describing what they looked like, especially if someone does not have a lot of time to read and figure out what type of rocks I’m talking about on each page.

New Formatting Idea

Since I originally wanted to create travel itineraries of which rocks to see on each day for approximately 7 days, Professor suggested that I format my book as an envelope with an itinerary on one sheet of paper for each day. Then, the reader could pick a day out of the envelope and follow that travel plan. I later had to abandon this great idea because I didn’t want to make itineraries anymore. I wanted to offer more flexibility to the reader of where to visit on which days, so I decided instead to focus on the features of each location instead of lumping them together. Then, the reader can choose their own travel plans instead.

Digital Iterations

Photo Choices

I tried to find pictures of different shapes instead of a bunch of long landscape photos. This was rather difficult because it was my natural tendency to pick a bunch of long panoramic shots. The panoramas really try to capture what it feels like to actually be at the location so I tended to include too many zoomed out landscape shots.

Through the photos I also tried to emphasize the different shapes of rocks commonly found at each location. Yes there is overlap in the types of rocks, because they are all in the same region. But I tried to emphasize the differences so that the reader doesn’t think that if they go to each location they would necessarily see the same rocks at each place.

Color Scheme

I chose a color scheme for each location based roughly on the colors of the rainbow. because even though the rocks are all reddish orange-ish, at different times of the day and at different agnles you can see different hues and i thought taht was very interesting I also tried to create a gradient in the way that I ordered the pictures, from dark to light on the page. This helped me make sense of the order to arrange my photos.

Grid Size

The initial grid was like 4 columns 8 rows. I spent a lot of time cropping photos down to the grid, and by the crit I realized that I needed to adjust the grid on each page, as the picture dimensions I had due to trying to fit the grid did not make sense in displaying the best view of each location. I had to let go of the drafts I had and remember that my grid could be more modular and flexible, and I had to remember that I need to try new options to see what works best.

Whitespace

I had a lot of trouble playing with the amount of whitespace. At first I was trying to pack as many photos in as possible; I just thought each location was too beautiful and I didn’t really know how to narrow down the photo choices. As a result my book looked more like a poorly designed brochure than a travel pocketbook. I also didn’t really play with some overlap between the pictures until much later, because at first I was hesitant to block parts of the landscapes that often extended beyond the edges of the picture frame. A long time later I eventually played around with it and found some sort of balance.

Crit Feedback

A lot of the feedback i got focused on white space. I also got feedback on the photo choices, whether it made sense which pictures I chose to be big or small. So for the final book I decided to have one large landscape photo, and some smaller photos that highlighted other types of rock found at the location. But I tried not to make the photos too small so that it was still clear what the subject of the photo was.

More Finishing Touches

I decided to play with the grid as well, since that had been causing problems with photo size. I settled on 6 rows and 3 columns for most pages, with no inside margin as I translated each single page location to a 2-page spread. Turning one page into two allowed me to increase the amount of whitespace and also blow up the landscape photos instead of trying to cram everything in. I also increased the margin all around to make it more comfortable to read and see the content, more like a book.

I also had some pictures bleed off the edge of the paper just trying to play around with a modular grid. I made sure not to do this excessively so as not to overcrowd the paper again.

Also, some pictures fit exactly on half of the spread, an intentional change as I played with how the pictures fit across 2 pages. I was still playing with arranging the content on the page in a way that made the most sense.

On one page I had a map representing where I took the pictures on that page. I wasn’t able to fit something like this into each page, still playing around with the amount of whitespace. For this map, at first I tried to run a Gaussian blur on a screenshot of Google Maps in Photoshop, but this didn’t turn out very nice so I decided to use a Google API that converted Google Maps to silver.

I ended up selecting at most 4 pictures per page, so that the pictures I chose would really be the ones that highlighted each location. I had to lose the cute little chipmunk but I was ok with this since the chipmunk didn’t really show the shape of the rock.

Color

Through the pictures I selected, I tried to further emphasize the color schemes. During the crit the schemes weren’t clear enough so I decided the colors by location should be:

• Bryce: White/Red
• Zion: Yellow
• Arches: Orange
• Sedona: Green
• Lake Powell: Turquoise
• Monument Valley: Indigo
• Antelope Canyon: Purple

Font

I changed the font because I wanted it to kinda look like other travel books such as National Geographic, or like an encyclopedia, but with a modern kick. I settled on a font that was serifed (PT Serif) and thus looked a little bit more like authentic geology or geography books, but slightly cleaner and more right-angled serifs to produce a more modern look.

Text

For the text content, I wrote a description of the place, and followed up with my own recommendations of what to do there that were a little bit wacky (for example drink from a water fountain that tastes like green apples) in order to balance the ancient pristine beauty of the rock with a fun adventure.

Icons

The icons include which state the location is in and the main type of shape featured at the location (e.g. mitten for Monument Valley). If the location was on the border between states (these rocks were in formation long before US state borders were drawn, which is why a lot of these locations are situated across state borders), I made a hybrid icon between the two states, with an “X” in between. I removed the AZ’s and the UT’s from the title because having the state initials and the symbol felt redundant, and the specific state that the rocks were in didn’t really matter too much anyway.

Front/Back Covers

I kept the covers relatively simple, to make it more of a surprise of the beautiful places inside. I offered a little peek at the content by fitting some photos into the letters A and Z: A for the front (the beginning), and Omega for the back (the end).

I wanted to break down the basic types of rocks in the book and show the reader that there can even be this many shapes of rocks, so I wanted the title to convey a sense of “introduction” to this subject. I also made it A to Z to show that I really did try to encompass all the different types of rock formations in the book. The front is Delicate Arch in Utah because it happens to be shaped sort of like an A, and the back is Horseshoe Bend in Arizona which is shaped like an upside-down Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet. I chose serif font to match the old with the new feeling: the rocks are old but I wanted my perspective of them to be new.

Unfortunately because I saved my work on Google Drive I only have the final iteration and not the intermediate steps since the crit.

Final

With those changes in mind here is my final printed book:

For this project I really had to let go of my apprehensions in straying from a very conventional format and allow myself to play with where to arrange content. It was scary at first because there was a lot of blank space on the page that I had to fill in, and I tried to fill it in too much. I learned about the balance of white space, choice in which pictures to blow up and which to keep a little smaller and navigate having full freedom to design a book.

P5 Process Documentation was originally published in CDF S19 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dive Into Swimming by, Anna Riegger

Indesign, Photoshop; May 2019

Process Documentation

My initial concept designs ranged from a drink recipe collection to world travel documentation for hiking to Chinese Basic Phrases to a Swim technique manual. I felt that I did not know enough about drink recipes or did not have enough hikes documented to follow these routes. I liked the Basic Chinese Phrases approach but was unsure if my grammar is good enough at this stage.

Because I felt that I knew most about and felt most passionate about swimming I decided to design my book around the concept of swimming. The original design was to have 2 spreads of each stroke. One spread would be the above water technique. It was going to have a view above the surface of the iconic view of the stroke spanning both the left and right pages. Opposite spreads would visualize the below water strokes. The grid structure would allow for text to be placed strategically outlining the important aspects of how to swim each stroke. Ideally the style would be simple with abstract illustrations. The grid formatting would create uniformity across all spreads while offering variability amid the above and below water contrasting perspectives. I used a color scheme which I created by pairing blues to show the nuances of the water.

The cover and two spreads I created for the Interim Crit encompassed a lot of these ideas.

Interim Crit

Feedback I got from the crit helped me to improve my designs. I changed the font. The feedback I received showed me how military the text looked prior to changes. I switched the text to ‘Avenir.’ The more humanistic and organic style of this font fit better with the overall scheme. The text is aligned with the gridding where there are 3 types of layouts patterned throughout the book. In addition, I changed the illustrations to be less pixelated and more complex. The new images embody the same abstract visuals but include more details like a water line and waves. The black lines of the illustrations tie the spread together with the text and the large title.

Furthermore, I decided to keep one spread for each stroke, instead of 2 spreads — one above and one below. I included additional spreads to detail a start, dive, flip turn and open turn. These created more diversity within my composition while still maintaining color and style uniformity.

Final Project (see top)

I’ve attached the final cover and back cover as well as the background images which I created by drawing on paper, scanning it into Photoshop, and editing.

If I had more time I would play around more with the grid structure and how the text could use the space more creatively. I especially enjoyed that I had the opportunity to draw for this project.

P5: Grid, Style and Format was originally published in CDF S19 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Final Product | Research & Concept | Design Process

Ingredients You’ll Need

5" x 5" Booklet, 60lbs paper, translucent paper vellum
Print/Illustration/Copy
2019
Individual Project
Rong Kang, Chew

with art from VectorStock (various artists), and photography from Pink Box Bakery, Live Well Bake Often, Taste of Home, Baking a Moment, America’s Test Kitchen, Sally’s Baking Addiction.

Research & Concept

As an avid baker (chocolate lava cakes are my signature treat!), I still sometimes struggle to understand the different ingredients in my baking, and often have to refer back to online guides when needing to substitute or experimenting. A therefore decided that I wanted to make a book on baking for my final project in Communication Design Fundamentals at Carnegie Mellon University.

I started with a researching modern cookbook layouts, there are however many variations — with the use of top-down photography and modern geometric fonts becoming a growing trend, instead of serif fonts and angled photographs.

I decided that I would focus on each ingredient by itself to describe its different characteristics, and show examples of how it is used. This would allow me to convey the important information of each ingredient. My identified ingredients were: Flour, Leaveners (Eggs), Sugar, Butter & Dairy, Chocolate and Fruit & Spices.

Design Process

I used Adobe InDesign to layout the spreads for this book, and started with a simple design that would have each ingredient take up its own section. Each ingredient would then have a few photos of desserts that showcase that ingredient. I used a general 6-column layout, and decided to limit myself to a 5" by 5" square to keep to a booklet format.

Experimenting with Overlays

During classtime, our instructor Suzanne showed us some previous work that used translucent vellum paper that overlaid another layer on top of a opaque layer. I wanted to use a similar concept to try to overlay information about baking on top of the desserts. (The vellum material also reminded me about baking paper!)

I did a two basic layouts for Chocolate in order to test the idea of using the vellum overlays, one with photography, and the other for illustrations. I found that for both tests, the overlays did not add not a lot of value to the layout, and made it difficult to appreciate both the text and the imagery.

I was a little dismayed that the end result was not as expected, but upon advice of Suzanne, I decided to leave the concept of overlays to the section headers. I pulled this header out into another page, and used a circular overlay that encapsulated the illustration with words describing the formats of the key ingredient.

The test for this layout was well-received by my peers during class critique, and an unintentional side effect of using the circular format was that there was leeway for some misalignment between the overlay and the illustration. This actually happened for my final result, as the vellum paper was hand-cut and the laser printer did not print at the same position when doing double-sided printing.

As this book would be a mix of both regular and vellum paper, I needed to count the number of pages so that the overlays would end up on the vellum paper on both halves of the book. I made a mock-up booklet on folded paper to verify that it actually matched up. I was pretty glad at the end result after all, and felt the hard work did pay off for experimenting with the overlays.

Keeping it Simple

With the header pulled out to the new section, and without overlays on top of the photography, I now had more space to try out different layouts for the information about the photographs.

I tried out two ideas that had the information mirror the layout of the photos to denote what it was describing. One used a simple grid of squares, and the other tried to mimic pieces of chocolate in an isometric format.

I received feedback that both layouts felt a little congested, especially that with the isometric chocolate which constrained both the text and the images that were cropped within. The shape of the chocolate also made it hard to see the dessert within as it imposed another shape upon its figure.

I decided to take a step further beyond using a grid of squares, and simplified the layout to only feature one hero image. This way, the photography could shine, and there was more space for text as well. I re-wrote the text to describe more about the ingredient, and have a blurb below about the dessert along with the photo credit. This new layout felt a lot more readable and pleasant to the eye.

Overall, I was quite pleased with the end result of the booklet, and felt that it accomplished its desired goal of educating readers about the all the Ingredients You’ll Need for baking in an interesting and unique format. Given more time, I would certainly like to experiment with more interesting layouts, and also come up with original art for the illustrations under each of the overlays. One day I perhaps will publish this booklet to help new and novice bakers.

Distilling to its Ingredients: Layouting a Booklet on Baking was originally published in CDF S19 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After a lot of consideration, I decided on the last idea, to do a travel book documenting my travels. Traveling is something that I cherish a lot but I personally haven’t documented any of it in my own way, which is something I have always wanted to do. Simply because of convenience, I decided to go backwards in time and start from my most recent travels.

Overall, I wanted to use simple designs and a variety of colors, to keep the flow and progression of the book interesting. For the title of the book, I went with “Wanderlust” because I saw it come up in the past in random advertisements or Instagram travel channels, and I really liked the meaning of it, which is “a strong desire or urge to travel and explore the world.” I decided to explain that concept, as well as the purpose of the book itself, before going into every individual trip I’ve gone on. Although the ideas for the first two spreads were pretty developed for the interim critique, I was still confused as to how to portray the pictures of the trips themselves without making the rest of the book look like a photo album. One thing I definitely wanted to do is have a full spread with one image from the country and then the next spread would be a collection of images. That being said, I decided to use the interim critique to see people’s suggestions regarding that concern. Below is my design that I had for the interim critique.

In summary, the main critiques for my interim critique were:

1. Don’t image trace the initial picture, since it doesn’t flow with the rest of the book.
2. Choose a different font.
3. Don’t use drop shadows on the photos — it’s distracting.
4. Fix the pixelated images on the second and third pages.
5. Add text to the spreads with multiple images to make it look less like a photo album.

I really appreciated these critiques and implemented all of them, and as a result I was really satisfied with the way my book turned out. It was more like a journal of all of my travels, while still highlighting the beauty and uniqueness of every place I went to. I really liked that I was able to use photos that I had taken myself as well!

Below are images of my final book!

Project 5 was originally published in CDF S19 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ideation

I wanted to make a book of an album because I wanted to make a piece that accompanied and was influenced by music. I decided to do Madvillainy because of the duality of the album’s artists that would work well with the two page spreads of a book. Madvillainy is a joint effort between a rapper and a producer, so I chose to explore each of their contributions to the songs off the album. Each spread would be one song with MF DOOM’s lyrics on the left and Madlib’s samples on the right. That meant that there would be two layouts for pages that I needed to figure out.

Layout

Lyrics

I chose to layout the lyrics in a single center-aligned column to evoke how poetry is usually presented. Adding more columns made it feel like more of an article than a song. However, because some of the songs were quite long with only a few words per line, I chose to have a very tall aspect ratio for the book. I think it effectively highlights how many words MF DOOM was able to fit in these songs that are generally under 3 minutes. It also

Samples

Because each of the songs had a wide variety of number of samples, I needed to figure out a grid system that would work for different numbers of elements. I chose a 2 column grid that allowed elements to stretch across both columns. This way, if a song only has 1 or samples, it can still take up enough space on the page to not seem empty.

Style

The style of the book was heavily influenced by the album art. I stuck to a grey background with orange highlight colors just like the cover art. For the lyrics and rhyming words, I picked bright colors to evoke real life highlighters. I liked how it looked a little overwhelming because I think listening for his rhymes can have a similar effect.

Results

CDF Project 5: Booklet was originally published in CDF S19 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a new year’s resolution for 2018, I set myself to release one song of my creation every month. I tend to have a lot of musical ideas that I start sketching out and working on, but I never seem to finish and publish them. This repeated cycle built a sense of laziness and a folder of unfinished projects, so I wanted to push myself to strengthen my musical creativity by being on a regular schedule. For each month, I chose a scheme of colors that best represents the song in terms of the vibe of the track as well as the inspirations in making the song. These inspirations ranged from visual scenes that I had in my head to the experiences that contributed to the creation of the song. I wanted to create a book that displayed the color palettes as well as mood boards of the respective inspirations so that the reader can listen to the songs and look at the book simultaneously to fully understand the stories behind each piece.

Initial Sketches

I wanted to take a simplistic approach with a lot of white space to keep things clean. On the left side, I wanted the color schemes that are on my YouTube, and on the right side, I wanted the mood boards. I had thoughts on incorporating a QR code to each song so that the readers could listen to the music while looking through the book. Besides this, the initial sketches didn’t give me much information except the general layout because I couldn’t visualize the mood board unless I saw the actual pictures and colors. I proceeded to the digital iterations very quickly.

Digital Iterations

These iterations were what I had prepared for my interim critique. I thought that the QR code would ruin the aesthetics, so I decided to think about it later. Some areas I wanted to get feedback on were whether the whitespace is too much and if the mood boards fit the colors and the vibes of the color schemes well. My peers recommended that I make the size of the spreads smaller so that I could minimize the whitespace while also using it effectively. I also received comments about the consistency of the mood board designs and layouts – for example, some had brush strokes and some didn’t. I thought about the mood board layouts a lot as individual spreads, but not as a whole book because each song was dedicated to one month separately. So I decided to treat each spread according to the song, even though the designs might be different every page.

Below are some of the other spreads and the progress I made as I got more feedback from my friends:

As I struggled with what designs and placements looked the best, what helped me a lot was connecting it back to my music, the musical sounds and elements. I kept on trying to arrange the images and color swatches according to the color schemes on the left, but the purpose of this book was for readers to understand the music better. It would make most sense for the mood board to connect to the music more than anything. This helped me make more difficult decisions in my mood board design, especially choosing the layout of the images and choosing the type of color swatches. What I concluded from this process was that it is okay if the layouts and designs are inconsistent every spread because every song is different per month, and each mood board connects to the song differently. For example, the track for November, ‘space travel’, is a very groovy, yet smooth track. Originally, the mood board for this track started with simple images, but seeing that it was too empty, I added color swatches in block form. I was satisfied with the design, but I realized that it did not fit the vibe and purpose of the song. Therefore, I decided to stay focused on making a design that isn’t solely for the purpose of aesthetics, but more for the meaning of the song. Because the song reminds me of taking a soothing trip around space, I created a gradient of pictures placed diagonally to show the transitions that may happen around you in outer space.

Some of the color schemes on the left were chosen based on the story behind how I created the songs. For example, the track for August was created by accident as my friend and I clicked on random drum sounds, and somehow it sounded pretty cool. Because the colors were chosen based on this experience and the title that I gave to the song, I thought it would be more appropriate for the mood board to represent this process. Therefore, I put a white canvas and a paint-splattered canvas together to express the accidental art we created.

This is the final iteration. Because the book is very clean and white, I thought it would be nice to have a simple, dark feel for the front and back. I used my favorite color, navy.

Conclusion

Throughout college, as I engaged with more people who also express themselves through other forms of art, I became interested in collaborating with those people to create something that engages all the human senses. By making this book, I was able to take on that challenge for myself. During the process, I realized that sometimes, music alone cannot fully convey the messages I want to deliver. Songs can bring certain emotions with the musical elements and speak through the lyrics, but having visual representations of the stories and inspirations behind the creation of the song can add so much more meaning. As an artist, I want to continue to explore the ways that deepen and enhance my musical storytelling.

2018 Monthly Music was originally published in CDF S19 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.