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(Course Title)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5


Assignment 5: Your choice
It's time for the final assignment where I will be using all of my previous knowledge to produce a book design of my choice. I've been...
Mar 11, 20226 min read
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Exercise 5.5: Reflective Practice
As the title of this exercise suggests, I was asked to reflect on everything I have experienced leading up to this point in creative book...
Mar 9, 20226 min read
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Exercise 5.4: Printing
In this exercise I was encouraged to experiment by printing my own images on the the different paper types I had gathered before. I was...
Mar 8, 20227 min read
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Exercise 5.3: On Press
This exercise asked me to think about the printing process and opens with a quote from Alan Pipes' On Press chapter, from his 2009...
Mar 6, 20223 min read
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Exercise 5.2: Planning your workflow
The next exercise was to plan my workflow, to think ahead for each stage of production so that I could decide the scope of my project,...
Mar 6, 20224 min read
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Exercise 5.1: What is your role?
Exercise 1 asks me to consider the roles at each stage of book production and how they will apply to me as I work towards Assignment 5....
Mar 4, 20224 min read
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Research Task: Book Fairs
Part 5 consists of a series of research and planning exercises that supports the final assignment where I will be designing and producing...
Mar 4, 20224 min read
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Assignment 4: Altered Book
This final assignment was something that I had been looking forward to since I started this section and involved finding and...
Mar 2, 20228 min read
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Exercise 4.4: Collating and Binding
Following on once more from the progress made in the previous exercise, I was asked to review, collate and rebind the images I have been...
Mar 2, 20225 min read
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Exercise 4.3: Sequencing Images
This exercise continued on from the last one by again working with Tango With Cows as my inspiration, but this time to construct a...
Mar 1, 20225 min read
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Exercise 4.2: Concrete Poetry
This exercise asked me to look at concrete poetry, a literary and visual art form where poets have enhanced their words through the...
Feb 26, 20227 min read
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Exercise 4.1: Paper Ephemera
Similarly to my collection of paper samples that I did for a research task for Part 2, I was asked to gather more paper ephemera. Where...
Feb 20, 20225 min read
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Research Task: Exploring Artists' Books
Part 4 starts with a focus on altered books, which presents an interesting set of exercises and an assignment with lots of room for...
Feb 14, 20225 min read
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Reflections: Creative Book Design Part 3
I've received my feedback for part 3 and after a troubled development process slowed me down during this section, I'm pleased that the...
Jan 20, 20224 min read
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Assignment 3: My Little Book Of...
After familiarising myself with using the Bridgeman and Oxford Art online image libraries outlined in research task 3, I moved on to work...
Jan 12, 20229 min read
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Exercise 3.3: Experimental Typography
Research Task 2: Choosing A Typeface Before the following exercise, I read through the chapter 'on choosing a typeface’ in the book,...
Oct 14, 20218 min read
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Exercise 3.2: Double-page spread
Following on from my research task on the golden section and grids, in this exercise I wanted to put those grids into practice through...
Sep 14, 20217 min read
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Research Task: The Golden Section
For this area of research I looked into instances of the Golden section as it appears in nature, design and artwork, including where can...
Aug 20, 20215 min read
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Exercise 3.1: Type Samples
Part 3 has a focus on typography and image as key areas of book design. Working with typography is something that I have not heavily...
Jul 31, 20217 min read
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Reflections: Creative Book Design Part 2
I've received my feedback from Part 2 of Creative Book Design, and it's been some of the most rewarding reassurance that I'm on the right...
Jul 28, 20214 min read
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Assignment 2: Form and Function
At the end of part 2, my assignment was to reimagine two covers for Daniel Defoe's famous 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. Intended to be...
Jun 30, 202114 min read
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Exercise 2.4: Designing A Cover
This exercise explored the idea of reinterpreting a book cover for a for a new edition of a previously released book. Re-releasing of...
Jun 13, 20215 min read
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Exercise 2.3: Book Designers
This exercise was split into four sections, beginning with research into a long list of fifteen unique cover designers, then comparing...
Jun 9, 20218 min read
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Research Task: Paper and Bookbinding
I read chapter 6 'On Press' from Alan Pipes' Production for graphic designers and found the extra information on the technical side of...
May 26, 20212 min read
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Exercise 2.2: Paper and binding choices
Now with more knowledge of book terminology, I moved on to the main exercise of looking at paper and binding options, starting with paper...
May 25, 20215 min read
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Research Task: Book Terminology
To familiarise myself with the correct terminology and phrases when talking about the main parts of a book, I looked at the suggested...
May 17, 20214 min read
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Exercise 2.1: The Function of Books
In this section I was asked to think critically about the form and function of books, starting with this first exercise where I needed to...
Apr 30, 202110 min read
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Reflections: Creative Book Design (Part 1)
I've received my feedback for part 1 of Creative book design and as with my previous unit, I'm returning to my reflections to see where I...
Apr 16, 20214 min read
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Assignment 1: Your zine
For my first book design assignment, I was asked to create my own A5 fanzine publication. This initially sounded like a daunting task,...
Mar 25, 20215 min read
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Exercise 1.7: Visualising, editing and Critiquing
Now that I had some hand on experience with on how a book could be formatted for print, I started thinking about how I could edit my...
Mar 17, 20213 min read
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Exercise 1.6: Folding and mocking up your book
This was a short and simple exercise guided me through making my own printed mock ups, which gave me insights into some of the ways that...
Mar 16, 20212 min read
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Exercise 1.5: Research & development
Following on directly from the last exercise, I now needed to select some of my designs to refine and develop into a mock-up through the...
Mar 16, 20214 min read
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Exercise 1.4: Generating Ideas
This exercise was the first of several connected exercises that leaned more on the physical aspects of creative book design and I was...
Mar 12, 20212 min read
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Exercise 1.3: Alternative Publications
Before the practical side of this exercise began, I was first asked to research artist books and fanzines, both of which are areas that I...
Mar 11, 20215 min read
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Exercise 1.2: The Future of the Book
I've not done academic research where I needed to digest a written piece and then write my personal responses in quite a while, but I...
Mar 5, 20216 min read
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Exercise 1.1: Influential Books
After finding my preferred workflow back in KSI-1, I started my first exercise in Creative Book Design after a hiatus between course...
Feb 12, 20218 min read
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End Of Year Update: 2020
To say that this year was a difficult one for everyone would be a grand understatement on an international level, but for my own end of...
Dec 31, 20202 min read
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Reflections: Key Steps In Illustration (Part 5)
My formative feedback has arrived for Part 5 and as I have done with the other four sections, I'll be once again picking out the key...
Aug 31, 20206 min read
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Assignment 5: Seven Days
I arrived at Assignment 5 and more than any of the other exercises and assignments, this was a very open project to create something...
Jul 14, 20208 min read
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Exercise 5.7: Educational Strip
I was asked to produce a series of educational illustrations to be used in schools based around the subject of puberty. Titled "What's...
Jul 13, 20205 min read
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Exercise 5.6: Working For Children
Working for children is always a fun challenge and for this exercise I needed to examine the differences between the types of imagery for...
Jul 9, 20206 min read
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Exercise 5.5: Packaging
In this project, I was asked to design packaging for a range of organic biscuits. The biscuit flavours would be Raisin, Chocolate Chip...
Jul 8, 20205 min read
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Exercise 5.4: Text and Image
This exercise was a short experiment in playing around with text and fonts. I was led through stages of giving a list of words character...
Jul 7, 20205 min read
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Exercise 5.3: Travel guides
For this exercise, I was asked to create covers for three travel guides for the cities of Istanbul, Helsinki and Milan. This was a very...
Jul 1, 20208 min read
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Exercise 5.2 Editorial Illustration
This exercise was centred around examining and producing images for articles as editorial illustrations and it made me think back to the...
Jun 1, 20209 min read
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Exercise 5.1: Your Own Work
The first exercise for part five had an interesting premise. I was asked to review my previous work with the aim of selecting pieces that...
May 30, 20205 min read
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Reflections: Key Steps In Illustration (Part 4)
I've now completed Part 4 and it has been assessed, so it's time to review how I'm doing. Part 4 was a challenging one for me, but I'm...
May 6, 20208 min read
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Assignment 4: Magazine Illustration
For my fourth assignment, I was asked to produce an illustration relating to one of the following themes: Lost | Disaster | Discovery |...
Apr 14, 20205 min read
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Exercise 4.7 Character Development
The premise of this exercise was to explore character development, something that I was interested to finally give a go. Whenever a video...
Apr 12, 20205 min read
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Exercise 4.6: Visual Distortion
This exercise was an exploration into distorting images to form a style, and was designed to force me to edit, change and distort through...
Apr 10, 20204 min read
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