Our tutorials are finished however, as many of us making photobooks for major project, last Wednesday one of our tutors Richard Higgingbottom delivered book making workshop. Higgingbottom is associated with Tide Press – independent photobook publishing company, what make him a specialist in book making process. Higgingbottom gave us a lot of useful information regarding photobooks and brought a lot of physical books, so we can get the idea about different sizes, covers, bindings, designs etc.
When making books there is many things to consider. Paper type, the thickness of the paper, size, scale, format, soft or a hard cover, colour of the cover, kind of bind, font in the book and on the cover, uppercase or lower case, the cover with the image or without, what writing on the cover both front and back (title, name or nothing), the consistency within the book or not at all to surprise the viewer…
Higgingbottom stated that the design must fit the context, however, the design is to elevate the project not to make the project better. The best photobooks are when the design relates to the project and make the viewer engaging with the project. So, we need to make an interesting book that tell the story we want to convey.
I asked Higgingbottom if hard cover would fit my project? He says that I should try it, and to make each portraiture huge full blead to humanize each of the subjects. He recommended book size like A3. As he told me to work on a sequence, he advised me to do a few more dummy books to see how it feels reading through each of them. First to sequence the images as kind of themes (people at work, people at homes looking straight, looking sideways, text etc). Second sequence with consistency. For example, portraiture with additional image, two single portraiture, one with the text and so on. Next one, start from colourful images and carry on to the ones with the lack of colours, or other way round. He also told me to look at Rob Hornstra work 100 Billionaires to see how the adding text works in the book. Thanks for your feedback Richard, I will try all of this.
My latest dummy book:
Higgingbottom also recommended few printing and binding companies:
F&G Ratchford to get stuff for binding; Spink & Thackray – book binding and hard covers; Precision in Leeds – hard cover binds; Entwistle in Manchester for prints, Hp indigo press printers; G & F Smith for paper – Art shop in Leeds and Manchester; For a book pages no thicker that 150gsm, for a cover around 275gsm if we want to fold it and bind it.
If you have any more ideas regarding book design or prints, please get in touch.
Marlena Sierota 