OUGD603 Bref 5: idea generation

While Kyle began to work on the content that will be included within the book, I began drawing up some ideas of how the book will be put together. With the research into the Mayans culture under our belts there was one main trait that we would take forward with designing the book was the handmade nature of their culture. With that in mind we began coming up with initial ideas to take forward.

From the success from my Set in Stone book from last year, I aim to work on the feedback I got from Stefan Sagmeister for that project. In in he said “While the usage of unusual materials on covers are of course possible (we just did one made out of copper and another one of plastic), this requires careful consideration as far as production, binding and usage. For your next book project, I'd go into the opposite direction: Use the most pedestrian production means possible, say stapled thin paper without any cover, and try to design this as gorgeously as you can.” for the generation of this book, this would stick with each idea for the book.

From each of the ideas, the ones that stood out was:

Having the pages as pull out slides / postcards that would be held in side a square box that would resemble the hieroglyphics that they used. This idea was scrapped as we decided that we wanted a book you can hold and flip through. That and the slides / postcards meant that the layout for each page was limited.

Having 3 covers that would fit together to form a Mayan calendar as this is one of the more famous piece of Mayan culture that the general public know about. We moved away from this as having three covers fit together and come apart proved to be more of a chore and would become a gimmick.

Another idea based on the last is use of the Mayan calendar and having it embossed into the cover which would be a more simplistic version. Both ideas would ultimately inform the final outcome.

One other idea that didn’t make it was the book concept based on the Mayan codex which where thread together by the corners of each page and would open up similar to that of a map. This would have been very large to open up and based on the prototypes that I made to test it, we found that people had a hard time opening it fully then trying to close it again. We ruled it out as it was too cumbersome for readers to just pick up and read.