OUGD603 Brief 5: Idea development

Idea development / Prototypes

From the initial ideas, the Mayan calendar kept cropping up within the designs. After speaking to Kyle and my peers within group crits, it was decided that the cover should incorporate it within the design as the calendar is one of the more known aspects of the Mayan world and it is what is mentioned when you ask people to name something from Mayan culture. I wasn’t happy with just having it sit flat on the cover and I wanted to make it stand out. So, after looking into the Mayan calendars and how they would be moved I began to look at how to incorporate the moving pieces into the cover.

After sketching up some ideas and creating some 3D digital mock ups of the designs on sketch I was happy with the concept. The idea itself was to have a material like mountboard as its relatively thin while also quite strong and stack it with different sized circles that would ultimately hold in the moving pieces of the cover so they won’t fall out. The rings themselves will have the design put on them either by screen printing them on or laser cutting them into them into the rings. Once the digital mock up looked right we began to prototype.

Prototype 1: for these early prototypes we kept them small so that we could make them on the cheep side. We settled on mount board as it was much thinner (and cheaper) than the likes of the foam board. This prototype began seeing how the book would be bound. Its design would be that of a regular hard back book, but it would have the contents stuck to the back page. While it looked nice at first, there was issues with flipping through the pages and the lack of double page spreads meant that it limited the layout of the content.

Prototype 2: To allow the book to be opened and it to sit flat on a surface we tried Coptic binding it which allowed us to include double page spreads. We were happy with how this looks, and the use of the red thread is a throw back to the thread used within the codex’s for the Mayans. We chose this design to take forward.

Prototype 3: Laser cutting the piece out to the square size of the book (based on the style the codex’s had) which is 20x20. We found that the needed to be more space between the moving pieces and the rings that hold them into place. We also found that there needed to be less friction between the mountboards as it proved difficult to move them, so we needed to add a smother surface.

Prototype 4: Having 1 mm space around the moveable parts proved to be the best to keep them in place and to allow them to move. The bottom of each piece has double sided tape without removing the backing to give them a smooth surface to remove friction and to allow them to rotate easily.