Studio Brief 2 - Spreads 9 and 10 (Contents Page and Introduction)

Before I started on my contents page I re-ordered

my spreads so that they followed on from each

other in a somewhat logical order as opposed to

the order I produced them in, which was just the

order I decided I'd include that subject in.

By using the 3 column grid I hoped that the page titles

would all fit on one line which would allow for more

consistency on throughout the spread. For reasons of

consistency I used 18 point size text as were all the

headings in my spreads. The description of each page

was done in 10pt for this reason also. Continuing on the

theme of consistency, I used images that had already

been used in my spreads, but smaller and cropped versions

of them to match the idea of the text, which was that the

contents page gives you a very limited idea of the pages.

When looking at the original spread, something looked

wrong. After a considerable while thinking about it, I

decided that the problem was the second page on each

side. The description for the Hue, Tone and Saturation

page was 3 lines long, whereas everything else was 2 lines

long. I fixed this by simply shortening the description slightly.

Then on the right page, the heading for Alignment,Rivers and 

Hyphenation took up  two lines rather than the one that all the

other headings took up. I fixed this by replacing the word "and"

with the ampersand, as this made it fit on one line, I then did it

with the other titles as well so they were consistent. I then

realised that having the page number aligned to the right of

the text box was similar to the format I used for showing quotes

in some of the spreads, so to match this hierarchy I made the

page number size 14 text, which I think was a good decision

in terms of the hierarchy. The result of these changes is shown

below. While the differences are only slight I'm a lot happier with it.

I wasn't really sure what to put in my introduction, but after looking

in various books of my own I noticed that there's not much information

on introduction pages anyway other than a short paragraph about the

book and the the author. I didn't fancy writing an "about the author"

paragraph, so I stuck to a fairly minimal layout. I left the top quarter of

the right page blank so it's consistent with the contents page. I used

images from the colour pages to brighten the spread up, as I think it

needs to be quite a bright spread due to it being the first one. The

majority of the text is on the left page as the text is far more important

than the images on this page, and so I placed it directly under the title,

next to the brighter image. I'm not overly pleased with this spread due

to the lack of content, but I think that was always going to be the case

compared to the rest of the spreads. If this had have been the first spread

I did I'd probably have been happy with it at the time, but I feel that it's

no-where near as good as the others that I've produced.

I then spell checked the whole document and converted it to a PDF

to burn onto a DVD for submission.