Status Report

Ok, so before I begin to crack on with this post I feel that I have to submit a formal warning due to the fact that this is probably going to be a bit of a long one; I am intending to show a few ideas that I have been experimenting with over the past two to three weeks you see. First of all, as you should all be aware of by now, my focus of research fell within the realms of joker cards and their designs. I collected one hundred of these as previously stated and to start off with I thought a few visuals of these could be interesting...



As an initial idea, I was really keen to work with designing a book from one sheet of paper that would fold out into a bigger design, thus housing the format of a poster. I mainly focussed on trying to convey a form of colour swatch using the reverse pattern design of each card as I personally found them rather engaging. When put together into one solid composition I think that the idea is quite successful and does engage an audience visually on some level. Despite this though, if I were to ask the question 'Would I put this on my wall?' ...well, I feel I would have to say no. Revisions are needed I think. What's more, at the time of constructing this design I hadn't come across the work by Deb Rindl which is shown below in the post 'Book? What's that then...'. In looking at his approach it is in my own opinion that his work provides a very successful method of folding and layout which culminates for a better result. Hopefully in coming weeks I will find the time to re-assess this idea amongst other plans I have for a book of jokers.





At this point I felt in my own mind that I had a personal vendetta to produce something that was more 'book like'... on a stereotypical level at least. With this I aimed to produce an A5 scale, thirty-two page booklet that would be able to engage the audience from cover to cover. After a short seminar with Fred, I borrowed the idea of photographing my objects whilst arranged in a pile based on the order of their height. I would then remove a card each time a photograph was taken and therefore be left with nothing; except one hundred photographs to document the process of course. As well as this however, I wanted to incorporate a range of statistics that I had discovered within my initial stages of research as this would not only make the book more unique, but also give an additional level of interest whilst reading.



As shown, I decided upon re-using some of the design work that was originally intended for my poster layout for the front and back covers. This works particularly well although might be a little misleading due to the fact that the content of the book is based on the face side of each card; not their patterned reverse.







Overall the feedback for this booklet was very positive and some rather constructive suggestions were made to make the physical appearance of the book more like a joker card itself. These included such things as rounding off the corners of the book, stylize the page numbering to look like the commonly recognised corners of playing cards, perhaps design a casing along the lines of a card box, to use paper that is of a similar weight to a playing card and to finally opt for a rectangular image format as opposed to square. All in all, a set of trivial details that I think would make the book even more successful; can't ask for more than that really!

So that brings me to now, two weeks left and a whole bunch of ideas to plough on with. Check back very shortly for updates as well as a fresh batch of book research to get your graphical juices flowing.

x