Invent with Ivan - screen grabs

Whilst making my book there was such a big focus on the content and designing each individual page that I did not really have time to document every page digitally, I took some screen grabs whilst I was working on random pages and I have compiled them together in this blog post. At this point the images are done and I am mocking them up in InDesign.

This is one of my favourite spreads from the book, the art style is really consistent across both of the pages and it just reads nicely.

I was speaking to my lecturer the other day and I mentioned that it was pretty good going with the pace that these images came together. I mean just after Easter I was content with the book being finished, at that point however it was only half the size it is now and it felt a little squashed, I was informed during a crit that this had to be amended. Since then I doubled my page numbers and essentially made another set of illustrations to accompany the existing ones.

The book reads a lot better now that I have extended it, tasks now last between 2 and 4 pages so there is plenty of space to set the scenario and there is also more room for information which makes it slightly more beneficial on the education front.

Amongst a few other things, space was one of my main issues whilst making this book, I designed every page with what I thought was ample space for text but until I had recently extended the book It turned out there wasn't much space at all.

This was a good challenge to overcome however because I had to learn to how shorten my script whilst still keeping it informative as well as be able to manipulate my text so that it fit better into the space.

As I got further towards completing the book I did begin to understand space a lot more. For example above is the back cover for my book, I had designed the custom bar code first and the space required to accommodate it was considered in advance before I started the back cover design. Also I illustrated a large grey box for dialogue, I even left a small little one above it for a mini title.

The answers page was another one that proved a little difficult, originally I had each image within it's respective square set to it's original colours, this all got a little confusing when all four of them were tiled up together. To change this I selected the pink tone that is consistent throughout the book and threw and overlay across all 4 images, this gave me a better canvas to draw the answer circles on to. They are a bit hard to see at this size but at print size they are fully legible.

Adding in that little thank you at the end was a nice feeling because I believe that was the last illustration I added to the book before I packaged the document.

I originally only wanted to get 4-6 spreads mocked up for the summer show, to say that I ended up completing the 32 page book feels incredibly satisfying.