California Kid's Travel Book

I ultimately decided to do the kid's california book after seeing how people responded to it when I was conducting the surveys, I had adults say even though it was a children's book they would find it fun to follow as well. The idea was to create a book that you could take on a family road trip; it takes you down the California coast, starting in San Francisco and ending in San Diego. It includes a map, pin pointing each city they will stop in. It includes activities for kids and their families to do in a variety of cities along the way. Some activities include: Disneyland, Sea World, Monterey Youth Museum, and Universal Studios. It is more so a picture book showing them attractions at each place they go to. I really enjoyed making this book, a lot having to do with my love for California and having done something similar when I was a kid with my family. I was having some issues with the layout at first, I didn't want it to be so monotonous and the same boring thing from page to page. I think the road at the bottom of the page helps tie it all together. It ended up being easier to make the graphics on the cover along with the graphics on the bottom of the page myself instead of trying to find clip art on the internet that looked similar to each other. I wanted the kids to have some sort of interaction with the book so it didn't turn into just a flip book so each page with a place has a box at the top of the page for the kids to place a sticker after they have completed that adventure Here is a sample of my book, I have included the cover as well as one of the pages.

Survey and sample layout

Before we could decide on a book for our type specimen book we needed to create a survey to gauge which idea (of 2) audiences would like more. Between my idea for a Chicago tourist/events book and a kid's california travel book, people seemed to like the travel book more. Here is the survey and sample layout I made for that particular idea.

Photo-Type Books

We were assigned to work on 3 books throughout the semester: manmade type, implied, and furniture. We had the last couple months to gather pictures for each of these projects. For the manmade we had to take a picture of each letter of the alphabet whether it was on a sign or in a logo on a building. For implied we needed to find objects that looked like each of the letters. For furniture we could either take our own pictures or find pictures off the internet of furniture and assign an appropriate font; we need 4 sans serif, 4 serif and had the option to do 4 that were 'wacky.' Here are the covers for each of the books as well as the pictures I took for manmade and implied letters.

Design Culture Now Poster

I wanted to try and mix text with shapes for this poster. I thought about 2-D design class and our exercises with squares and circles and how we would experiment with different arrangements and how the layout can shape the eye movement of the page. I chose a series of circles for your eyes to follow to down to the text for the speakers. I ran into some issues when I got to the last 2 names of the speakers because the companies were longer in letters than the first 2. So I ultimately had to change how i layed out the first 2 so they could all look uniform and not like they were all doing their own thing and create chaos for the eyes. I also use the title of the poster "Design Culture Now" as a way to create a sort of frame around the page so your eyes would go around the edge of the page then on down.

Grids and layout

Researching for book spreads

My two ideas for the book spreads turned into a children's travel book down the coast of California and a book containing Chicago events such as the Taste of Chicago and the Pride Parade. To research I looked up the history of tourism in general as well as the history of California, Taste and the parade to get a better understanding of where it all began and how it got to where it is today. Here are links to the pages I looked at

http://hnn.us/articles/39893.html

http://www.visitcalifornia.com/AM/Template.cfm?Section=History&ContentID=2277

http://www.chicagofreepress.com/node/1945"

http://www.explorechicago.org/city/en/supporting_narrative/events___special_events/events/mose/history_of_the_taste.html

http://www.explorechicago.org/city/en/about_the_city/our_history.html